Research Summaries

Back The Role of Pycnocline Turbulent Fluxes in the Evolution of Weddell Sea Water Column Stability

Fiscal Year 2010
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Oceanography
Investigator(s) Radko, Timour
Shaw, William
Stanton, Timothy P.
Sponsor National Science Foundation (NSF)
Summary We propose to analyze two ocean turbulence data sets and several larger scale regional CTD surveys from the Weddell Sea to investigate processes acting in very weakly stratified regions of the Southern Ocean. These weakly stratified areas are associated with large scale deep convection events like the Weddell Sea Polynya which formed in the 1970's and persisted for two years, providing massive coupling between the deep ocean and the atmosphere. The data set gathered by our group being used allow the relative contribution of wind-forced ice motion, internal/inertial wave activity, double diffusive processes and thermobaricity to eroding the pycnocline, potentially leading to full water column overturn. These processes are not currently considered in large scale models, and yet have potentially large influences on the total heat fluxes between the ocean interior and atmosphere. The effects of stronger surface forcing associated with climate change will be modeled to understand the future stability of the coupled system. These ocean structure and climate change implications are critical for coupled ocean-atmosphere Naval predictive models.
Keywords Turbulent Boundary Layers Model Parameterizations Arctic Ice Changes
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal