A document by Andrew Styles. Click on the document to view its contents.

Ocean ventilation translates atmospheric forcing into the ocean interior. The Southern Ocean is an important ventilation site for heat and carbon and is likely to influence the outcome of anthropogenic climate change. We conduct an extensive backwards-in-time trajectory experiment to identify spatial and temporal patterns of ventilation. Temporally, almost all ventilation occurs between August and November. Spatially, ‘hotspots’ of ventilation account for 60% of open-ocean ventilation on a 30 year timescale; the remaining 40% ventilates in a circumpolar pattern. The densest waters ventilate on the Antarctic shelf, primarily near the Antarctic Peninsula (40%) and the west Ross sea (20%); the remaining 40% is distributed across East Antarctica. Shelf-ventilated waters experience significant densification outside of the mixed layer.

Observations indicate that symmetric instability is active in the East Greenland Current during strong northerly wind events. Theoretical considerations suggest that baroclinic instability may also be enhanced during these events. An ensemble of idealised numerical ocean models, forced with northerly winds show that the short time-scale response (from two to four weeks) to the increased baroclinicity of the flow is the excitation of symmetric instability, which sets the potential vorticity of the flow to zero. The high latitude of the current means that the zero potential vorticity state has low stratification, and symmetric instability destratifies the water column. On longer time scales (greater than four weeks), baroclinic instability is excited and the associated slumping of isopycnals restratifies the water column. Eddy-resolving models that fail to resolve the submesoscale should consider using submesoscale parameterisations to prevent the formation of overly stratified frontal systems following down-front wind events. The mixed layer in the current deepens at a rate proportional to the square root of the time-integrated wind stress. Peak water mass transformation rates vary linearly with the time-integrated wind stress. The duration of a wind event leads to a saturation of mixing rates which means increasing the peak wind stress in an event leads to no extra mixing. Using ERA5 reanalysis data we estimate that between 1.5Sv and 1.8Sv of East Greenland Coastal Current Waters are produced by mixing with lighter surface waters during wintertime by down-front wind events. Similar amounts of East Greenland-Irminger Current water are produced at a slower rate.

Gyres are prominent surface structures in the global ocean circulation that often interact with the sea floor in a complex manner. Diagnostic methods, such as the depth-integrated vorticity budget, are needed to assess exactly how such model circulations interact with the bathymetry. Terms in the vorticity budget can be integrated over the area enclosed by streamlines to identify forces that spin gyres up and down. In this article we diagnose the depth-integrated vorticity budgets of both idealized gyres and the Weddell Gyre in a realistic global model. It is shown that spurious forces play a significant role in the dynamics of all gyres presented and that they are a direct consequence of the Arakawa C-grid discretization and the z-coordinate representation of the sea floor. The spurious forces include a numerical beta effect and interactions with the sea floor which originate from the discrete Coriolis force when calculated with the following schemes: the energy conserving scheme (ENE); the enstrophy conserving scheme (ENS); and the energy and enstrophy conserving scheme (EEN). Previous studies have shown that bottom pressure torques provide the main interaction between the depth-integrated flow and the sea floor. Bottom pressure torques are significant, but spurious interactions with bottom topography are similar in size. Possible methods for reducing the identified spurious topographic forces are discussed. Spurious topographic forces can be alleviated by using either a B-grid in the horizontal plane or a terrain-following vertical coordinate.

Density staircases are observed in an idealised model of a deep western boundary current upon crossing the equator. We propose that the staircases are generated by the excitement of symmetric instability as the current crosses the equator. The latitude at which symmetric instability is excited can be predicted using simple scaling arguments. Symmetric instability generates overturning cells which, in turn, cause the inhomogenous mixing of waters with different densities. The mixing barriers and well mixed regions in density profiles coincide, respectively, with the boundaries and centres of the overturning cells generated by the symmetric instability. This new mechanism for producing density staircases may require us to re-evaluate the origins of some of the density staircases observed in the Tropical Atlantic.

Translation of atmospheric forcing variability into the ocean interior via ocean ventilation is an important aspect of transient climate change. On a seasonal timescale, this translation is mediated by a so-called “Demon’ that prevents access to all except late-winter mixed-layer water. Here, we use an eddy-permitting numerical circulation model to investigate a similar process operating on longer timescales in the high-latitude North Atlantic, which we denote the “interannual Demon’. We find that interannual variations in atmospheric forcing are indeed mediated in their translation to the ocean interior. In particular, the signature of persistent strong atmospheric forcing driving deep mixed layers is preferentially ventilated to the interior when the forcing is ceased. Susceptibility to the interannual Demon depends on the location and density of subduction — with the rate at which newly ventilated water escapes its region of subduction being the crucial factor.

Diapycnal mixing shapes the distribution of climatically-important tracers, such as heat and carbon, as these are carried by dense water masses in the ocean interior. Here, we analyze a suite of observation-based estimates of diapycnal mixing to assess its role within the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The rate of water mass transformation in the Atlantic Ocean’s interior shows that there is a robust buoyancy increase in the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW), with a diapycnal circulation of up to 4 Sv between 24N and 32S in the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, tracers within the southward-flowing NADW may undergo a substantial diapycnal transfer, equivalent to hundreds of metres in the vertical. This result is confirmed with a zonally-averaged numerical model of the AMOC and indicates that tracer mixing can lead to divergent global pathways and ventilation timescales following the upwelling of tracers in the Southern Ocean. These results point to the need for a realistic mixing representation in climate models in order to understand and credibly project the ongoing climate change.