The Front Cover (25k JPEG)
Ocean Circulation and Atmospheric Surface Forcing Fields
A team led by Carl Wunsch and John Marshall at MIT is conducting simulations to forecast the "weather" of the Earth's oceans. Top: Monthly mean fields of the net sea surface heat flux and the surface wind stress as provided by the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) re-analysis for January 1993. Bottom: The circulation of the Pacific Ocean at 63-meter depth (blue vector field) for 1993 by combining an ocean circulation model with one year of absolute TOPEX/POSEIDON sea surface height data. This also shows the sea surface height field associated with the interior ocean flow field.