Wind stress from wind speed

[a_sengupta@unsw_edu_au]

Hi,
Im trying to recover the wind stress from wind-speed and other variables (T, SST, Q etc). I think I am able to do this using code from the coupler's flux_mod.F90 routine. However, if I use wind speed, temperature etc from atmosphere and ocean history files , my resulting calculated wind stress has a similar spatial pattern to the history file wind stress but is generally smaller (by about ~20-50%).
I have compared output coming out of flux_mod.F90 with my code and the results are the same - so it looks like something is happening to the wind-stress after passing out of flux_mod.F90.

Can anyone help?
Many thanks
Alex

 

[kauff]

It's possible/likely that the history file data are all monthly averages, so that a calculation of wind stress using monthly avg data as input does not result in the monthly avg of wind stress.