Importance of the Atmospheric Boundary Layer over the Oceans in Synoptic Scale Meteorology

The problems of turbulence in geophysics are usually thought of as encompassing a microscale, a mesoscale and a synoptic scale, and often it is not clear how they can be interrelated and how to obtain useful information at the synoptic scale. The rate of growth of a spectral component in a building wind-generated sea has been related to derivatives of the mean wind profile. The properties of the wind profile over water may best be determined at the microscale but the waves over the ocean are a synoptic scale phenomenon. These facts would be academic were it not for the additional fact that polar orbiting spacecraft may soon make it possible to measure the waves over the ocean on a global scale twice a day and that if the conditions defining the mesoscale were better understood a very high quality surface synoptic weather map for wind fields and pressure patterns could be produced. Progress in this area is described.