The relative importance of the wind-driven and tidal circulations in Malacca Strait

• The winds significantly affect the tidal currents in different ways in the northern and southern strait.
• Wind-driven current energy is more significant in the northern channel than in the southern one.
• Channel-wide eddy is an important transient feature of the total circulation in the northern strait.
• Wind-forcing rather than coastal contraction or bathymetry is the main driver of such an eddy.

The Malacca Strait is traditionally treated as a typical tidally-driven channel with the wind-driven and other components considered negligible. However, the strait is frequently affected by intense tropical weather events distorting the background monsoon winds. The variable winds can create large wind-stress curl at the surface level. To answer the question of how significant the wind-driven circulation is to the total circulation, numerical simulations are carried out by isolating or superimposing the different driving mechanisms. Comparison of the time series at selected points reveals that the winds significantly affect the tidal currents in different ways in the northern and southern strait. In the northern wide strait, the tidal current is enhanced while in the southern narrow channel it is weakened. Experiments with uniform water depth confirm that the weakening is mainly due to the interaction among tidal current, wind-driven current and bathymetry in the southern strait. Spectral analysis of the currents in the whole MS quantifies that the wind-driven current energy is more significant in the northern channel than in the southern one. Furthermore, winds with high intensity and large wind-stress curl can produce an eddy as large as the northern channel width which significantly distorts the tidal circulation especially during the neap tide. Vorticity analysis shows that the eddy in the northern Malacca Strait is purely wind-driven. Our study highlights that the wind stress, which has been ignored in previous studies in this region, is an important driver of the circulation in the Malacca Strait even when tidal forcing is strong.