Sea level and its horizontal gradient are an expression of oceanic volume, heat content, and currents. Large-scale currents have historically been viewed as mostly “baroclinic’, and tides as “barotropic’, respectively, in the sense of being strongly related to the oceanic density distribution or not. The purpose of this note is to give dynamical precision to this distinction and, in the particular case of the tides, demonstrate the breadth of their combined barotropic-baroclinic interactions with a realistically forced, high-resolution simulation of the Pacific Ocean circulation. While the different tidal sea-level contributions manifest a horizontal scale separation (\eg more barotropic at larger scales; more baroclinic surface pressure-gradient force at smaller scales), there are cross-mode corrections in both at the level of tens of percent.

The Borderland Basins off Southern California are semi-isolated sea-floor depressions with connections to each other and to the open Pacific Ocean over narrow sills. A high-resolution, multi-year simulation is analyzed for its currents, stratification, and dissolved oxygen, with a focus on the mean conditions, intrinsic variability, and exchange rates with surrounding waters. The three shallowest, closest basins are given the most attention: Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, and San Pedro. From a combination of multiple means of estimation, the deep basin water mass renewal times are on the order of a year or more, and this time is somewhat shorter in the Santa Barbara Basin than the others.

Release of iron (Fe) from continental shelves is a major source of this limiting nutrient for phytoplankton in the open ocean, including productive Eastern Boundary Upwelling Systems. The mechanisms governing the transport and fate of Fe along continental margins remain poorly understood, reflecting interaction of physical and biogeochemical processes that are crudely represented by global ocean biogeochemical models. Here, we use a submesoscale-permitting physical-biogeochemical model to investigate processes governing the delivery of shelf-derived Fe to the open ocean along the northern U.S. West Coast. We find that a significant fraction (∼20%) of the Fe released by sediments on the shelf is transported offshore, fertilizing the broader Northeast Pacific Ocean. This transport is governed by two main pathways that reflect interaction between the wind-driven ocean circulation and Fe release by low-oxygen sediments: the first in the surface boundary layer during upwelling events; the second in the bottom boundary layer, associated with pervasive interactions of the poleward California Undercurrent with bottom topography. In the water column interior, transient and standing eddies strengthen offshore transport, counteracting the onshore pull of the mean upwelling circulation. Several hot-spots of intense Fe delivery to the open ocean are maintained by standing meanders in the mean current and enhanced by transient eddies and seasonal oxygen depletion. Our results highlight the importance of fine-scale dynamics for the transport of Fe and shelf-derived elements from continental margins to the open ocean, and the need to improve representation of these processes in biogeochemical models used for climate studies.

High-resolution simulations by the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) were used to investigate the dispersal of the San Francisco Bay (SFB) plume over the northern-central California continental shelf during the period of 2011 to 2012. The modeled bulk dynamics of surface currents and state variables showed many similarities to corresponding observations. After entering the Pacific Ocean through the Golden Gate, the SFB plume is dispersed across the shelf via three pathways: (i) along the southern coast towards Monterey Bay, (ii) along the northern coast towards Point Arena, and (iii) an offshore pathway restricted within the shelf break. On the two-year mean timescale, the along-shore zone of impact of the northward-dispersed plume is about 1.5 times longer than that of the southern branch. Due to the opposite surface Ekman transports induced by the northerly or southerly winds, the southern plume branch occupies a broader cross-shore extent, roughly twice as wide as the northern branch which extends roughly two times deeper due to coastal downwelling. Besides these mean characteristics, the SFB plume dispersal also shows considerable temporal variability in response to various forcings, with wind and surface-current forcing most strongly related to the dispersing direction. Applying constituent-oriented age theory, we determine that it can be as long as 50 days since the SFB plume was last in contact with SFB before being flushed away from the Gulf of the Farallones. This study sheds light on the transport and fate of SFB plume and its impact zone with implications for California’s marine ecosystems.