ANGEO Annales Geophysicae ANGEO 1432-0576 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/angeo-26-395-2008 Surface buoyancy flux in Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea Anitha G. 1 Ravichandran M. 1 Sayanna R. 2 Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad, India Osmania University, Hyderabad, India 26 03 2008 26 3 395 400 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.ann-geophys.net/26/395/2008/angeo-26-395-2008.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.ann-geophys.net/26/395/2008/angeo-26-395-2008.pdf

The seasonal variation of thermal, haline, net surface buoyancy flux, the Monin-Obukhov length (M-O length, <I>L</I>) and stability parameter, i.e. the ratio of M-O length to mixed layer depth (<I>h</I>) were studied in the Bay of Bengal (BoB) and the Arabian Sea (AS) for the years 2003 and 2004 using Argo temperature and salinity profiles. The relative quantitative influence of winds to surface buoyancy and the applicability of scaling mixed layer using M-O length in BoB and AS was brought out. Rotation and light penetration modify the mixed layer depth from M-O length during shoaling in spring giving <I>L/h</I><1.

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