Surface waves induced by tropical cyclones (TCs) play an important role in the air–sea interaction, yet are seldom observed. In the 2017 summer, a wave glider in the northern South China Sea successfully acquired the surface wave parameters when three TCs (Hato, Pakhar, and Mawar) passed though successively. During the three TCs, surface wave period increased from 4–6 s to ~8–10 s and surface wave height increased from 0–1 m to 3–8 m. The number of wave crests observed in a time interval of 1024 s decreased from 100–150 to 60–75. The sea surface roughness, a key factor in determining the momentum transfer between air and sea, increased rapidly during Hato, Pakhar, and Mawar. Surface waves rotated clockwise (anti-clockwise) on the right (left) side of the TC track, and generally propagated to the right side of the local cyclonic tangential direction relative to the TC center. The azimuthal dependence of the wave propagation direction is close to sinusoidal in a region within 50–600 km. The intersection angle between surface wave direction and the local cyclonic tangential direction is generally smallest in the right-rear quadrant of the TC and tends to be largest in the left-rear quadrant. This new set of glider wave observational data proves to be useful for assessing wave forecast products and for improvements in corresponding parameterization schemes.

Three typhoons (Rammasun, Kalmaegi, and Sarika) travelled through the deployed stations in the northern South China Sea from 2014–2016. During the passage of typhoons, strong winds and vigorous currents resulted in horizontal displacement of buoy over 2000 m, vertical displacement of ropes on buoys as much as 200 m. The rectification can correct the warm anomaly to cool anomaly of temperature. These movements lead to biases of raw data, with temperature bias as much as 4°C, salinity as much as 0.05 psu, velocity bias as much as 0.4 m/s. The crosscheck of current velocity from different instruments shows that the bias of overlapping velocity and correlation coefficient after depth rectification obviously enhances. The observation shows that temperature cools 1.5 °C, and 0.1 psu saltier in maximum, the near-inertial current increases to 0.4 m/s in the upper layer. The inertial kinetic energy propagates downward with the upward phase, and the maximum depth can reach over 2000 m.