Evolution of an atmospheric Kármán vortex street from high-resolution satellite winds: Guadalupe Island case study

Vortex streets formed in the stratocumulus-capped wake of mountainous islands are the atmospheric analogues of the classic Karman vortex street observed in laboratory flows past bluff bodies. The quantitative analysis of these mesoscale unsteady atmospheric flows has been hampered by the lack of satellite wind retrievals of sufficiently high spatial and temporal resolution. Taking advantage of the cutting-edge Advanced Baseline Imager, we derived km-scale cloud-motion winds at 5-minute frequency for a vortex street in the lee of Guadalupe Island imaged by Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16. Combined with Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data, the geostationary imagery also provided accurate stereo cloud-top heights. The time series of geostationary winds, supplemented with snapshots of ocean surface winds from the Advanced Scatterometer, allowed us to capture the wake oscillations and measure vortex shedding dynamics. The retrievals revealed a markedly asymmetric vortex deca...