Mohamed Kaouah (LMD & LEGOS, France); Lionel Renault (LEGOS, France)

At midlatitudes, air-sea interactions have been documented in numerical models, in situ campaigns and satellite observations down to the ocean mesoscales. Such interactions are characterized by a coupling of surface winds with sea surface temperature anomalies or with ocean currents. However little is known for scales of a few kilometers (the submesoscales) and we rely mostly on high-resolution numerical simulations.
SWOT provides not only sea surface height at kilometers scales, but also surface wind speeds at the same resolution (through the measurement of the backscatter coefficient, related to ocean roughness). Here, we take profit of this new dataset to examine the potential of the satellite to detect correlations between surface winds and SST.
Different regions of the world ocean were examined during the fast sampling phase. In this talk, we present a particular situation in the Gulf Stream area during which scatterometer winds, SST and Chlorophyll at kilometer scales were available at the same time. A good correspondence between winds from SWOT, scatterometers and ECMWF forecast is found at the mesoscales. More importantly, we show that SWOT detects submesoscale features of 10 km scales, correlated with SST anomalies and Chlorophyll. We also present other situations in different ocean regions indicating that SWOT is a valuable tool for air-sea interactions studies through its surface wind measurements.