Baroclinic Instability in the Ocean

In a new JPO paper, Ross Tulloch, John Marshall, Chris Hill and Shafer Smith report on an observational, modeling and theoretical study of the scales, growth rates and spectral fluxes of baroclinic instability in the ocean, permitting a discussion of the relation between the instability scale, the first baroclinic deformation scale (R1) and the equilibrated eddy scale.

Malte Jansen is a third year graduate student in PAOC at MIT. He has been using MITgcm in an idealized study to explore how mixing by eddies may influence the equilibrium state of the extra-tropical atmosphere and the Southern Ocean and in particular why the two regimes exhibit such a different equilibrium state.

Motivated by observations indicating rapidly falling annual sea-ice minima, Manfredi Manizza and co-workers have been using an Arctic configuration of MITgcm to explore the Arctic Ocean Carbon Cycle.

Familiar as we are with satellite images of hurricanes, the impact of these powerful storms on the upper ocean is markedly less visible. Dr Sarah Zedler (Texas A&M University) has been using MITgcm to help understand the features that appear in oceanic field data as a result of hurricane passage above.

How would you explain the large scale pattern of weather fronts to a general audience? Roman Kowch, an undergraduate major in EAPS, has been exploring one way; as part of a UROP project with Lodovica Illari, Chris Hill and Constantinos Evangelinos.

Prompted by the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Ross Tulloch, Chris Hill and Oliver Jahn have been using MITgcm to compute the vulnerability of individual locations to remote buoyant surface plumes.

As we did last year we have collected a sample of 2010 research articles that involved MITgcm in some way. Take a look…

This month we look at work by Nicolas Grisouard and Chantal Staquet of the Laboratoire des Ecoulements Geophysiques et Industriels, Grenoble, France, who have been using MITgcm to model internal solitary waves (ISWs) of a kind observed in the Bay of Biscay.

What is it about MITgcm that it spawns so many great movies? In a break with science stories, MITgcm shares 3 recent movies showcasing projects using MITgcm.

In a first for models simulating the 3d dynamics of both ocean and atmosphere, the MITgcm climate model has been found to exhibit three different stable states for exactly the same set of parameters and external forcings, suggesting that climates may exhibit multiple equilibria even in the presence of a vigorous internal variability sustained by weather systems and ocean-atmosphere-sea ice interactions…