The South China Sea （SCS） is significantly influenced by El Nino and the Southern Oscillation （ENSO） through ENSO-driven atmospheric and oceanic changes. We analyzed measurements made from 1960 to 2004 to investigate the interannual variability of the latent and sensible heat fluxes over the SCS. Both the interannual variations of latent and sensible heat fluxes are closely related to ENSO events. The low-pass mean heat flux anomalies vary in a coherent manner with the low-pass mean Southern Oscillation Index （SOI）. Time lags between the heat flux anomalies and the SST anomalies were also studied. We found that latent heat flux anomalies have a minimum value around January of the year following El Nino events. During and after the mature phase of E1 Nino, a change of atmospheric circulation alters the local SCS near-surface humidity and the monsoon winds. During the mature phase of E1 Nino, the wind speed decreases over the entire sea, and the air-sea specific humidity difference anomalies decreases in the northern SCS and increases in the southern SCS. Thus, a combined effect of wind speed anomalies and air-sea specific humidity difference anomalies results in the latent heat flux anomalies attaining minimum levels around January of the year following an E1 Nino year.
A new simple two-scale model on the polarimetric microwave emission of ocean surface is derived at first, which can be ex-pressed as an integral of weighting functions (M0 and M2) and ocean surface curvature spectrum coefficients (C0 and C2). This provides a simple way to investigate the effect of curvature spectrum on ocean emission. It is found that ocean waves with wavelengths both comparable to and much greater than the electromagnetic wavelength can contribute to the harmonics of ocean surface microwave emission, depending on the magnitude of the ocean surface spectrum in these length scales. Bright-ness temperature predictions differ significantly due to present diverse spectrum models, and thus a study on wave spectrum obtained inversely from brightness temperature measurements is necessary. From the ocean surface radiation data measured by polarimetric microwave radiometer, we derived an ocean wave spectrum with a wider wave number range, using the proposed two-scale model and constrained linear least-squares method. The derived ocean wave spectrum is useful for comparing with present diverse models.
