The South China Sea is a marginal basin with a complex circulation influenced by the East Asian Monsoon, river discharge and intricate bathymetry. As a result, both the mesoscale eddy field and the near-inertial energy distribution display large spatial variability and they strongly influence the oceanic transport and mixing. With an ensemble of numerical integrations using a regional ocean model, this work investigates how the temporal resolution of the atmospheric forcing fields modifies the horizontal and vertical velocity patterns and impacts the transport properties in the basin. The response of the mesoscale circulation in the South China Sea is investigated under three different forcing conditions: monthly, daily and six-hourly momentum and heat fluxes. While the horizontal circulation does not display significant differences, the representation of the vertical velocity field displays high sensitivity to the frequency of the wind forcing. If the wind field contains energy at the inertial frequency or higher (daily and six-hourly cases), then Vortex Rossby waves and near inertial waves are excited as ageostrophic expression of the vigorous eddy field. Those waves dominate the vertical velocity field in the mixed layer (vortex Rossby waves) and below the first hundred meters (near inertial waves) and they are responsible for the differences in the vertical transport properties under the various forcing fields as quantified by frequency spectra, vertical velocity profiles and vertical dispersion of Lagrangian tracers.

Wavelike spiral asymmetries are an intriguing aspect of Tropical Cyclone dynamics. Previous work hypothesized that some of them are Vortex Rossby Waves propagating on the radial gradient of mean–flow relative vorticity. In the Intermittently Forced Vortex Rossby Wave theory, intermittent convection near the eyewall wind maximum excites them so that they propagate wave energy outward and converge angular momentum inward. The waves’ energy is absorbed as the perturbation vorticity becomes filamented near the outer critical radii where their Doppler–shifted frequencies and radial group velocities approaches zero. This process may initiate outer wind maxima by weakening the mean–flow just inward from the critical radius. The waves are confined to a relatively narrow annular waveguide because of their slow tangential phase velocity and the narrow interval between the Rossby wave cut–off frequency, where the radial wavenumber is locally zero, and the zero frequency, where it is locally infinite.