Current response to wind in the Chukchi Sea: A regional coastal upwelling event

A cruise was conducted on the NOAA ship Oceanographer in August and September 1986 in the Chukchi Sea. Four short‐term moorings were instrumented with sediment traps and Aanderaa RCM4 current meters. The currents at the three moorings near the Alaskan coast indicate a reversal of the normal northeastward flow to southwestward. This reversal was produced by wind, which had begun to blow from the east‐northeast at up to 4.2 m s−1. The temperature time series indicated that upwelling colder water was moving upward near the coast. The nearshore mooring had the largest amplitude variation of currents and the largest temperature variation. The amplitude of the reversal decreased offshore. The station farthest from the coast was near the ice edge and on the other side of Barrow Canyon and a subsea bank. The flow there was consistently toward the east and is only poorly related to the wind. Water mass analysis was conducted using two techniques; the first was a traditional TS diagram method, and the second was a cluster analysis on TS pairs for the surface and near‐bottom waters. Based on the shapes of the TS curves and their positions on the TS diagrams, a map of the water masses was constructed. A cluster analysis was performed on the surface TS pairs from each station and separately for the bottom TS pairs. For both of these techniques, the line separating the groupings follows the temperature contours (5° at the surface and 4° at the bottom) and the bottom salinity contours (32.5 PSU).