Factors Influencing The Structure Of The Monterey Bay Sea Breeze

The sea breeze is a thermally induced circulation that arises along essentially every coastline. However, the Monterey Bay circulation associated with the sea breeze varies day to day because of the influence of features such as inversions, clouds, synoptic-scale flow, and topography. Understanding the sea breeze is important because it impacts fire weather, air pollution, agriculture, and aviation operations, among other things. Analyses are conducted using a multi-quadric based program to investigate the Monterey Bay sea breeze during 01-31 August 2003. This program incorporates aircraft data, surface observations, and profiler data. Outputs from the analysis program are plotted in VISUAL to characterize the structure of the sea breeze. Factors including inversions, cloud cover, amount of heating, distribution of heating, synoptic- scale flow, and topography are studied to determine their influence on the sea breeze. Six days are presented in this thesis that best illustrate the factors that influence the structure of the Monterey Bay sea breeze. Results show that offshore flow weakened the strength of the sea breeze and decreased the depth, as expected. A cooling trend in surface temperatures at the end of the month also weakened the strength of the sea breezes and decreased the depth. Clouds are present during this period, which influenced the amount of heating, and consequently, the sea breeze response. The presence of a marine layer weakened the thermal gradient that in turn, weakened the sea breeze circulation.