remote sensing Article Statistical Characteristics of the Response of Sea Surface Temperatures to Westward Typhoons in the South China Sea Zhaoyue Ma 1, Yuanzhi Zhang 1,2,*, Renhao Wu 3 and Rong Na 4 1 School of Marine Science, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China;
[email protected] 2 Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999777, China 3 School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai 519082, China;
[email protected] 4 College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +86-1888-885-3470 Abstract: The strong interaction between a typhoon and ocean air is one of the most important forms of typhoon and sea air interaction. In this paper, the daily mean sea surface temperature (SST) data of Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for Earth Observation System (EOS) (AMSR-E) are used to analyze the reduction in SST caused by 30 westward typhoons from 1998 to 2018. The findings reveal that 20 typhoons exerted obvious SST cooling areas. Moreover, 97.5% of the cooling locations appeared near and on the right side of the path, while only one appeared on the left side of the path. The decrease in SST generally lasted 6–7 days. Over time, the cooling center continued to diffuse, and the SST gradually rose. The slope of the recovery curve was concentrated between 0.1 and 0.5.