David Marshall

Abstract:

Ventilation of the upper ocean plays an important role in climate variability on interannual to decadal timescales by influencing the exchange of heat and carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and ocean. The turbulent nature of ocean circulation, manifest in a vigorous mesoscale eddy field, means that pathways of ventilation, once thought to be quasi-laminar, are in fact highly chaotic. We characterise the chaotic nature of ventilation pathways according to a nondimensional ‘filamentation number', which estimates the reduction in filament width of a ventilated fluid parcel due to mesoscale strain. In the subtropical North Atlantic of an eddy-permitting ocean model, the filamentation number is large everywhere across three upper ocean density surfaces — implying highly chaotic ventilation pathways — and increases with depth. By mapping surface ocean properties onto these density surfaces, we directly resolve the highly filamented structure and confirm that the filamentation number captures its spatial variability. These results have implications for the spreading of atmospherically-derived tracers into the ocean interior.

Abstract:

A simple relationship, based on thermal wind balance, is derived that relates the relative strength of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to the ratios of three depth scales: the e-folding depth of the global stratification, the depth of maximum overturning streamfunction and the maximum depth of the ACC. For realistic values of these depth scales, the relationship predicts a factor 8 ± 4 difference in the volume transports of the ACC and AMOC, consistent with the observation-based ratio of 8 ± 2.

Abstract:

Jets are an important element of the global ocean circulation. Since these jets are turbulent, it is important that they are characterized using a statistical framework. A high resolution barotropic channel ocean model is used to study jet statistics over a wide range of forcing and dissipation parameters. The first four moments of the potential vorticity distribution on contours of time-averaged streamfunction are considered: mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. A self-similar response to forcing is found in the mean and standard deviation for eastward barotropic jets which exhibit strong mixing barriers; this self-similarity is related to the global potential enstrophy of the flow. The skewness and kurtosis give a behaviour which is characteristic of mixing barriers, revealing a bi/trimodal statistical distribution of potential vorticity with homogenized potential vorticity on each side of the barrier. The mixing barrier can be described by a simple statistical model. This behaviour is shown to be lost in westward jets due to an asymmetry in the formation of zonal mixing barriers. Moreover, when the statistical analysis is performed on eastward jets in a streamfunction following frame of reference, the distribution becomes monomodal. In this way we can distinguish between the statistics due to wave-like meandering of the jet and the statistics due to the more diffusive eddies. The statistical signature of mixing barriers can be seen in more realistic representations of the Southern Ocean and is shown to be an useful diagnostic tool for identifying strong jets on isopycnal surfaces. The statistical consequences of the presence, and absence, of mixing barriers are likely to be valuable for the development of stochastic representations of eddies and their dynamics in ocean models.