HIMAWARI-8 GEOSTATIONARY SATELLITE OBSERVATION OF THE INTERNAL SOLITARY WAVES IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

Abstract

The new generation geostationary meteorological satellite, Himawari-8 (H-8), was launched in 2015. Its main payload, the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI), can observe the earth with 10-minute interval and as high as 500–m spatial resolution. This makes the H-8 satellite an ideal data source for marine and atmospheric phenomena monitoring. In this study, the propagation of internal solitary waves (ISWs) in the South China Sea is investigated using AHI imagery time series for the first time. Three ISWs cases were studied at 3:30–8:00 UTC on 30 May, 2016. In all, 28 ISWs were detected and tracked between the time series image pairs. The propagation direction and phase speeds of these ISWs are calculated and analyzed. The observation results show that the properties of ISW propagation not stable and maintains nonlinear during its lifetime. The resultant ISW speeds agree well with the theoretical values estimated from the Taylor-Goldstein equation using Argo dataset. This study has demonstrated that the new generation geostationary satellite can be a useful tool to monitor and investigate the oceanic internal waves.