Determination of stress from wind and temperature measurements

Abstract An integrated form of the diabatic wind profile based on similarity theory is used to estimate surface stress from measured winds and temperatures. It is shown that excellent estimates of stress can be made, given the roughness length, an estimate of the Richardson number and an accurate wind at one level. The theory can further be applied to estimate the roughness length from relatively few observations of wind and temperature not necessarily under neutral conditions. Suggestions by Taylor and Deacon for the determination of surface stress from autocovariance functions are tested on O'Neill observations. The results show that fair stress estimates can be made if instrumental response is taken into account.