Unsupervised classification identifies coherent thermohaline structures
in the Weddell Gyre
Abstract
The Weddell Gyre is a dominant feature of the Southern Ocean and an
important component of the climate system; it regulates air-sea
exchanges, controls the formation of deep and bottom water, and hosts
upwelling of relatively warm subsurface waters. It is characterized by
extremely low sea surface temperatures, active sea ice formation, and
widespread salt stratification that stabilizes the water column.
Studying the Weddell Gyre is difficult, as it is extremely remote and
largely covered with sea ice; at present, it is one of the most
poorly-sampled regions of the global ocean, highlighting the need to
extract as much value as possible from existing observations. Thanks to
recent efforts of the EU SO-CHIC project, much of the existing Weddell
Gyre data, including ship-based CTD, seal tag, and Argo float profiles,
has been assembled into a coherent framework, enabling new comprehensive
studies. Here, we apply unsupervised classification techniques (e.g.
Gaussian Mixture Modeling) to the new comprehensive Weddell Gyre dataset
to look for coherent regimes in temperature and salinity. We find that,
despite not being given any latitude or longitude information,
unsupervised classification algorithms identify spatially coherent
thermohaline domains. The highlighted features include the Antarctic
Circumpolar Current, the central Weddell Gyre, and the Antarctic Slope
current; we also find potential signatures of the inflow of Weddell Deep
Water and export pathways of Antarctic Bottom Water. We show how varying
the statistical, machine learning derived representations of the data
can reveal different physical structures and circulation pathways that
are relevant to the delivery of relatively warm waters to the
higher-latitude seas and their associated ice shelves.