Akurathi Venkata Sai Chaitanya

The Bay of Bengal receives large amounts of freshwater from the Ganga‐Brahmaputra (GB) river during the summer monsoon. The resulting upper‐ocean freshening influences seasonal rainfall, cyclones, and biological productivity. Sparse in situ observations and previous modeling studies suggest that the East India Coastal Current (EICC) transports these freshwaters southward after the monsoon as an approximately 200 km wide, 2,000 km long “river in the sea” along the East Indian coast. Sea surface salinity (SSS) from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite provides unprecedented views of this peculiar feature from intraseasonal to interannual timescales. SMAP SSS has a 0.83 correlation and 0.49 rms‐difference to 0–5 m in situ measurements. SMAP and in stu data both indicate a SSS standard deviation of ∼0.7 to 1 away from the coast, that rises to 2 pss within 100 km of the coast, providing a very favorable signal‐to‐noise ratio in coastal areas. SMAP also captures the strong northern BoB, postmonsoon cross‐shore SSS contrasts (∼10 pss) measured along ship transects. SMAP data are also consistent with previous modeling results that suggested a modulation of the EICC/GB plume southward extent by the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). Remote forcing associated with the negative Indian Ocean Dipole in the fall of 2016 indeed caused a stronger EICC and “river in the sea” that extended by approximately 800 km further south than that in 2015 (positive IOD year). The combination of SMAP and altimeter data shows eddies stirring the freshwater plume away from the coast.

The Bay of Bengal (BoB) exhibits a wide range of sea surface salinity (SSS), with very fresh water induced by heavy monsoonal precipitation and river run-offs to the north, and saltier water to the south. This is a particularly challenging region for the application of satellite-derived SSS measurements because of the potential pollution of the SSS signal by radio frequency interference (RFI) and land-induced contamination in this semi-enclosed basin. The present study validates recent level-3 monthly gridded (1° × 1°) SSS products from Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and Aquarius missions to an exhaustive in situ SSS product for the BoB. Current SMOS SSS retrievals do not perform better than existing climatologies. This is in stark contrast to Aquarius, which outperforms SMOS and available SSS climatologies everywhere in the BoB. While SMOS only captures the SSS seasonal evolution in the northern part of the Bay, Aquarius accurately captures the seasonal signal in the entire basin. The Aquarius product is also able to capture SSS non-seasonal anomalies, with an approximate correlation (r) of 0.75 with box-averaged in situ data in the northern, central, and western parts of the Bay. Aquarius can, thus, be confidently used to monitor large-scale year-to-year SSS variations in the BoB.

Being the only tropical ocean bounded by a continent to the north, the Indian Ocean is home to the most powerful monsoon system on Earth. Monsoonal rains and winds induce huge river discharges and strong coastal currents in the northern Bay of Bengal. To date, the paucity of salinity data has prevented a thorough description of the spreading of this freshwater into the bay. The potential impact of the salinity on cyclones and regional climate in the Bay of Bengal is, however, a strong incentive for a better description of the water cycle in this region. Since May 2005, the National Institute of Oceanography conducts a program in which fishermen collect seawater samples in knee-deep water at eight stations along the Indian coastline every 5 days. Comparison with open-ocean samples shows that this cost-effective sampling strategy is representative of offshore salinity evolution. This new dataset reveals a salinity drop exceeding 10 g kg−1 in the northern part of the bay at the end of the summer monsoon. This freshening signal propagates southward in a narrow (~100 km wide) strip along the eastern coast of India, and reaches its southern tip after 2.5 months. Satellite-derived alongshore-current data shows that the southward propagation of this “river in the sea” is consistent with transport by seasonal coastal currents, while other processes are responsible for the ensuing erosion of this coastal freshening. This simple procedure of coastal seawater samples collection could further be used to monitor phytoplankton concentration, bacterial content, and isotopic composition of seawater along the Indian coastline.