story by Helen Hill for MITGCM
Andreas Klocker, an oceanographer working at the University of Tasmania, has been using MITgcm to explore the sensitivity of ventilation to surface wind stress in the Southern Ocean.
Andreas Klocker‘s work focuses on understanding ocean turbulence and its effects on large-scale ocean circulation, with a special interest in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the Antarctic Slope Front Current. To understand these fundamental processes, he uses a combination of theory, numerical ocean models, and observations.
In a paper published today in Science Advances, Klocker shows how the interaction between Southern Ocean jets, topographic features, and ocean stratification can lead to rapid changes in ventilation as a function of wind stress.
Ocean ventilation transports climatically important tracers such as heat, freshwater, and CO2 through the surface mixed layer and into the ocean interior. Changes in ventilation are thought to be important for both rapid transitions in the ocean’s global overturning circulation during the last glaciation and the uptake and storage of excess heat and CO2 resulting from anthropogenic climate change.
Using MITgcm to simulate the sector of the Southern Ocean between 57° and 129° in longitude and 70° and 35° S in latitude, Klocker ran a series of experiments looking at the draw-down of tracer under conditions of increasing mean wind stress.
The experiments show how the interaction between Southern Ocean jets, topographic features, and stratification can lead to rapid changes in Southern Ocean ventilation as a function of wind stress.
For increasing winds, his results show this interaction leading from a state in which tracers are confined to the surface mixed layer to a state in which tracers fill the ocean interior.
In addition, for sufficiently high winds, Klocker finds an abrupt change in jet dynamics, allowing the tracer to ventilate Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW) in the mid-depth Southern Ocean.
To find out more about this study contact Andreas
This Month’s Featured Publication
- Klocker, A. (2018), Opening the window to the Southern Ocean: The role of jet dynamics, Science Advances, 03 Oct 2018: Vol. 4, no. 10, eaao4719, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aao4719
Related Publication
Klocker, A., Abernathey R. (2014), Global patterns of mesoscale eddy properties and diffusivities, Journal of Physical Oceanography, 44, (3) pp. 1030-1046, doi: 10.1175/JPO-D-13-0159.1
Other New Publications this Month
Charlotte Breitkreuz, André Paul, Takasumi Kurahashi‐Nakamura, Martin Losch, Michael Schulz (2018), A dynamical reconstruction of the global monthly‐mean oxygen isotopic composition of seawater, Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans, doi: 10.1029/2018JC014300
Paola Cessi (2018), The effect of northern hemisphere winds on the meridional overturning circulation and stratification, Journal of Physical Oceanography, doi: 10.1175/JPO-D-18-0085.1
James E. David (2018), Effects of Propagating Submerged Objects on Diffusive Staircases, Masters Thesis, US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/59647/18Jun_Davis_James.pdf
Edward W. Doddridge and David P. Marshall (2018), Implications of Eddy Cancellation for Nutrient Distribution Within Subtropical Gyres, Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans, doi: 10.1029/2018JC013842
Rino M. Guerrero (2018), Influence of Acceleration on the Pattern and Dynamics of Stratified Wakes, Masters Thesis, US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/59671/18Jun_Guerrero_Rino.pdf
Haines, K. (2018), Ocean reanalyses, In “New Frontiers in Operational Oceanography”, E. Chassignet, A. Pascual, J. Tintoré, and J. Verron, Eds., GODAE OceanView, 545-562, doi: 10.17125/gov2018.ch19
Hakase Hayashida, James R. Christian, Amber M. Holdsworth, Xianmin Hu, Adam H. Monahan, Eric Mortenson, Paul G. Myers, Olivier G. J. Riche, Tessa Sou, and Nadja S. Steiner (2018), CSIB v1: a sea-ice biogeochemical model for the NEMO community ocean modeling framework, Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., doi: 10.5194/gmd-2018-191
Christopher Horvat, Eli Tziperman (2018), Understanding Melting due to Ocean Eddy Heat Fluxes at the Edge of Sea‐Ice Floes, Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1029/2018GL079363
Alfredo Izquierdo, Uwe Mikolajewicz (2018), The Role of Tides in the Spreading of Mediterranean Outflow Waters along the Southwestern Iberian Margin, Ocean Modelling, doi: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2018.08.003
Weinwen Ji, Ru Chen, and Jun Yang (2018), Idealized Wind-driven Ocean Circulations on Exoplanets, arXiv:1809.01376v1 [astron-ph.EP]
C. S. Jones, and Paola Cessi (2018), Components of upper-ocean salt transport by the gyres and the meridional overturning circulation, Journal of Physical Oceanography, doi: 10.1175/JPO-D-18-0005.1
Guillaume Jouvet, Yvo Weidmann, Marin Kneib, Martin Detert, Julien Seguinot, Daiki Sakakibara, Shin Sugiyam (2018), Short-lived ice speed-up and plume water flow captured by a VTOL UAV give insights into subglacial hydrological system of Bowdoin Glacier, Remote Sensing of Environment, doi: 10.1016/j.rse.2018.08.027
Kallevig, Mark; Kelly, Samuel (2018), Basin Mode Waves in a Rotating, Cylindrical, Water Tank, Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://hdl.handle.net/11299/199908
Lee, T., and C. Gentemann (2018), Satellite SST and SSS observations and their roles to constrain ocean models, in “New Frontiers in Operational Oceanography”, E. Chassignet, A. Pascual, J. Tintoré, and J. Verron, Eds., GODAE OceanView, 271-288, doi: 10.17125/gov2018.ch11
J. Mak, J. R. Maddison, D. P. Marshall, D. R. Munday (2018), Implementation of a geometrically informed and energetically constrained mesoscale eddy parameterization in an ocean circulation model, Journal of Physical Oceanography, doi: 10.1175/JPO-D-18-0017.1
S. D. Martyanov, A. Yu. Dvornikov, V. A. Ryabchenko, D. V. Sein, S. M. Gordeeva (2018), Investigation of the Relationship between Primary Production and Sea Ice in the Arctic Seas: Assessments based on a small-component model of a marine ecosystem, Fundamentalnaya i Prikladnaya Gidrofizika, 11, 2, 108—117, doi: 10.7868/S207366731802010
Richardson, Darren Paul (2018), The domain agnostic generation of natural language explanations from provenance graphs, University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis, 148pp, https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/423465/
M. N. Pisareva (2018), An overview of the recent research on the Chukchi Sea water masses and their circulation, Russian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 18, 4, 2018, doi: 10.2205/2018ES000631
Ufuk Utku Turuncoglu (2018), Towards in-situ visualization integrated earth system models: RegESM 1.1 regional modeling system, Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., doi: 10.5194/gmd-2018-179
Vasiliy Vlasenko, and Nataliya Stashchuk (2018), Tidally Induced Overflow of the Faroese Channels Bottom Water Over the Wyville Thomson Ridge, Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans, doi: 10.1029/2018JC014365
Do you have news about research using MITgcm? We are looking for contributions to these pages. If you have an interesting MITgcm project (ocean, atmosphere, sea-ice, physics, biology or otherwise) that you want to tell people about, get in touch. To make a post, contact Helen