Estimation of Sea Fog Movement Using Satellite Data and 20-km WRF Wind Field in the East Sea from February to April in 2014

Estimation of Sea Fog Movement Using Satellite Data and 20-km WRF Wind Field in the East Sea from February to April in 2014

Sea fog is a common oceanic weather phenomenon that sometimes results in ship wrecks from reduced visibility; hence needs to be monitored regularly. The Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) provides 500m spatial resolution hourly during the daytime. Knowing the trend of sea fog movement over time specific to regions and seasons have the feasibility to predict the future positions of sea fog detected from GOCI in the upcoming hours. Keeping this objective in mind the present study is conducted to estimate the shift of sea fog in relation to the advection of WRF model sea surface wind in the East Sea region for some selected sea fogs in February to April 2014. The advection of sea fog was measured considering the shift of easily traceable pixels located on the boundary of sea fog from consecutive hours GOCI images. Then the sea fog advection was analyzed in relation to sea surface wind advection data extracted from WRF wind model data. For most of the sea fogs the speed is found to be more than 3 ms-1 with the highest value of 23.63 ms-1, whereas in a few cases surface wind speed at 10 m above ground level (AGL) was found to be higher than 3 ms-1. However, it was found that the changes in the directions of sea fogs and surface winds shows similar trends.