A comparison of wind stress datasets for the South China Sea

The wind stresses and their derived wind stress curls, and Sverdrup stream functions over the South China Sea (SCS) in typical winter and summer months from nine datasets are compared. The datasets include CCMP, CERSAT, ASCAT, QSCAT, NCEP, QSCAT-NCEP, HR, ERA-40, and ERA-Interim. Results show that the overall patterns of the wind stresses, wind stress curls, and Sverdrup stream functions from different datasets are similar. However, their magnitudes are remarkably different. Among them, ERA-40 is the smallest while HR is the largest. The former is about 40 % smaller than the mean value, while the latter is about 50 % greater than the mean value. The spatial resolution is important for the presentation of the wind stress features in the SCS. It can be expected that the same numerical ocean model driven by different wind stress would yield remarkably different results.