The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

Winds blowing over the ocean not only generate surface waves but also another type, so-called internal waves, which can travel down into the ocean. These internal waves carry a large amount of wind-injected energy into the ocean interior and are thought to play an important role in sustaining ocean turbulent mixing and circulation. Based on observations from a mooring station at the East China Sea (ECS) shelf slope, we provided evidence that the passage of a tropical cyclone (TC) can induce different types of internal wave responses: near-inertial and high-frequency internal waves. Different from the typical near-inertial response, near-inertial internal waves (NIWs) after TC Fitow showed a complicated phase pattern due to its superposition with parametric subharmonic instability (PSI)-generated M₁ subharmonic waves. The wind-injected near-inertial kinetic energy (NIKE) was largely restrained to the upper 250 m. Wave-packet analysis revealed the cooccurrence of enhanced NIKE, circularly polarized near-inertial currents, veering NIW propagation direction, and shrinking NIW vertical wavenumber at the base of the Kuroshio Current (~ 180 m). This indicated the trapping and stalling of the TC-generated NIWs. Intense high-frequency internal waves (HFIWs) appeared immediately after TC Fitow which had an average period of ~ 24 minutes and lasted ~ 8 hours. HFIWs also existed before the arrival of TC Fitow with a regular semidiurnal cycle. However, the HFIW after TC did not follow the semidiurnal cycle and had much larger amplitudes and longer-lasting periods. Local generation of supercritical flow over a slope or evolution from propagating internal tide as modified by TC may have induced these HFIWs. Along with the occurrence of intense HFIWs after TC Fitow, intense energy transfers from NIWs to HFIWs were identified. Due to the limited vertical propagation of TC-induced NIWs, it was the PSI-generated M₁ subharmonic wave rather than the wind-induced NIW that contributed most to the energy transfer.

Internal waves; Nonlinear dynamics; Small scale processes; Tropical cyclones