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Latitudinal structure of the meridional overturning circulation variability on interannual to decadal time scales in the North Atlantic Ocean (2020)

Zou, Sijia ; Lozier, M. Susan ; Xu, Xiaobiao

American Meteorological Society

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Publication Date: 2022-05-25

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Climate 33(9), (2020): 3845-3862, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-19-0215.1.

Description: The latitudinal structure of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) variability in the North Atlantic is investigated using numerical results from three ocean circulation simulations over the past four to five decades. We show that AMOC variability south of the Labrador Sea (53°N) to 25°N can be decomposed into a latitudinally coherent component and a gyre-opposing component. The latitudinally coherent component contains both decadal and interannual variabilities. The coherent decadal AMOC variability originates in the subpolar region and is reflected by the zonal density gradient in that basin. It is further shown to be linked to persistent North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) conditions in all three models. The interannual AMOC variability contained in the latitudinally coherent component is shown to be driven by westerlies in the transition region between the subpolar and the subtropical gyre (40°–50°N), through significant responses in Ekman transport. Finally, the gyre-opposing component principally varies on interannual time scales and responds to local wind variability related to the annual NAO. The contribution of these components to the total AMOC variability is latitude-dependent: 1) in the subpolar region, all models show that the latitudinally coherent component dominates AMOC variability on interannual to decadal time scales, with little contribution from the gyre-opposing component, and 2) in the subtropical region, the gyre-opposing component explains a majority of the interannual AMOC variability in two models, while in the other model, the contributions from the coherent and the gyre-opposing components are comparable. These results provide a quantitative decomposition of AMOC variability across latitudes and shed light on the linkage between different AMOC variability components and atmospheric forcing mechanisms.

Description: The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Physical Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (Awards OCE-1756143 and OCE-1537136) and the Climate Program Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Award NA15OAR4310088). Gratitude is extended to Claus Böning and Arne Biastoch who shared ORCA025 output. S. Zou thanks F. Li, M. Buckley, and L. Li for helpful discussions. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

Keywords: Deep convection ; Ocean circulation ; Thermocline circulation

Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server

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Overflow Water pathways in the North Atlantic (2023)

Lozier, M. Susan ; Bower, Amy S. ; Furey, Heather H. ; [et al.]

Elsevier

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Publication Date: 2023-02-21

Description: © The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Lozier, M., Bower, A., Furey, H., Drouin, K., Xu, X., & Zou, S. Overflow Water pathways in the North Atlantic. Progress In Oceanography, (2022): 102874, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2022.102874.

Description: As part of the international Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP), 135 acoustically-tracked deep floats were deployed to track the spreading pathways of Iceland-Scotland Overflow Water (ISOW) and Denmark Strait Overflow Water (DSOW) from 2014 to 2018. These water masses, which originate in the Nordic Seas, are transported by the deepest branch of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The OSNAP floats provide the first directly-observed, comprehensive Lagrangian view of ISOW and DSOW spreading pathways throughout the subpolar North Atlantic. The collection of OSNAP float trajectories, complemented by model simulations, reveals that their pathways are (a) not restricted to western boundary currents, and (b) remarkably different from each other in character. The spread of DSOW from the Irminger Sea is primarily via the swift deep boundary currents of the Irminger and Labrador Seas, whereas the spread of ISOW out of the Iceland Basin is slower and along multiple export pathways. The characterization of these Overflow Water pathways has important implications for our understanding of the AMOC and its variability. Finally, reconstructions of AMOC variability from proxy data, involving either the strength of boundary currents and/or the property variability of deep waters, should account for the myriad pathways of DSOW and ISOW, but particularly so for the latter.

Description: MSL gratefully acknowledges the support from the Physical Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant OCE-2017522). ASB, HHF and SZ gratefully acknowledge the support from the Physical Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant OCE-1756361). KLD gratefully acknowledges the support from the Physical Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant OCE-1851075). XX gratefully acknowledges the support from the Physical Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant OCE-2038449). RAFOS float data can be accessed at Woods Hole Open Access Server (https://doi.org/10.26025/1912/24388).

Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server

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Lagrangian views of the pathways of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (2019)

Bower, Amy S. ; Lozier, M. Susan ; Biastoch, Arne ; [et al.]

American Geophysical Union

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Publication Date: 2023-02-21

Description: Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans 124(8), (2019): 5313-5335, doi:10.1029/2019JC015014.

Description: The Lagrangian method—where current location and intensity are determined by tracking the movement of flow along its path—is the oldest technique for measuring the ocean circulation. For centuries, mariners used compilations of ship drift data to map out the location and intensity of surface currents along major shipping routes of the global ocean. In the mid‐20th century, technological advances in electronic navigation allowed oceanographers to continuously track freely drifting surface buoys throughout the ice‐free oceans and begin to construct basin‐scale, and eventually global‐scale, maps of the surface circulation. At about the same time, development of acoustic methods to track neutrally buoyant floats below the surface led to important new discoveries regarding the deep circulation. Since then, Lagrangian observing and modeling techniques have been used to explore the structure of the general circulation and its variability throughout the global ocean, but especially in the Atlantic Ocean. In this review, Lagrangian studies that focus on pathways of the upper and lower limbs of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), both observational and numerical, have been gathered together to illustrate aspects of the AMOC that are uniquely captured by this technique. These include the importance of horizontal recirculation gyres and interior (as opposed to boundary) pathways, the connectivity (or lack thereof) of the AMOC across latitudes, and the role of mesoscale eddies in some regions as the primary AMOC transport mechanism. There remain vast areas of the deep ocean where there are no direct observations of the pathways of the AMOC.

Description: The authors extend their thanks to Xiaobiao Xu for valuable comments on the first draft of this manuscript. A. B. (WHOI), H. F., M. S. L., N. F., and K. D. were supported by Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program grants OCE‐1259618, OCE‐1259013, and OCE‐1259102 from the U.S. National Science Foundation. S. Z. was supported by the Climate Program Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under award NA16OAR4310168. M. L. was supported through the MOVE project, funded by NOAA's Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program under award NA15OAR4320071. A. B. (GEOMAR) and S. R. received funding from the Cluster of Excellence 80 “The Future Ocean” within the framework of the Excellence Initiative by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) on behalf of the German federal and state governments (grant CP1412) and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the SPACES projects AGULHAS (grant 03F0750A) and CASISAC (grant 03F0796A). No new data are reported in this project. The data mentioned in the text may be found in repositories cited in each previously published paper cited in this review manuscript.

Keywords: Floats ; Drifters ; Lagrangian methods ; AMOC ; Atlantic Ocean ; Numerical models

Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server

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Moored observations of the Iceland-Scotland Overflow plume along the eastern flank of the Reykjanes Ridge (2021)

Johns, William E. ; Devana, Manish ; Houk, Adam ; [et al.]

American Geophysical Union

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Publication Date: 2022-10-26

Description: Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 126(8), (2021): e2021JC017524, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JC017524.

Description: Since 2014, an array of current meters deployed in the Iceland Basin as part of the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program has provided new measurements of the southward flow of Iceland-Scotland Overflow Water (ISOW) along the eastern flank of the Reykjanes Ridge. The location of the array, near 58–59°N, captures the ISOW plume at the farthest downstream location in the Iceland Basin before significant amounts of ISOW can flow into the Irminger Basin through deep fractures in the Reykjanes Ridge. The net transport of the ISOW plume at this location—approximately 5.3 Sv based on the first 4 years of observations—is significantly larger than previous values obtained farther north in the Iceland Basin, suggesting that either previous measurements did not fully capture the plume transport or that additional entrainment into the ISOW plume occurs as it approaches the southern tip of the Reykjanes Ridge. A detailed water mass analysis of the plume from continuous temperature/salinity observations shows that about 50% of the plume transport (2.6 Sv) is derived from dense waters flowing over the Nordic Sea sills into the Iceland Basin, while the remainder is made up of nearly equal parts of entrained Atlantic thermocline water and modified Labrador Sea Water. The overall results from this study suggest that the ISOW plume approximately doubles its transport through entrainment, similar to that of the Denmark Strait overflow plume in the Irminger Sea that forms the other major overflow source of North Atlantic Deep Water.

Description: Financial support for this research was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grants OCE-1259398 and OCE-1756231. S. Zou acknowledges support by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant OCE-1756361.

Description: 2022-02-13

Keywords: Iceland-Scotland Overflow ; Transport ; Entrainment ; North Atlantic Deep Water

Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server

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Rapid freshening of Iceland Scotland Overflow Water driven by entrainment of a major upper ocean salinity anomaly (2022)

Devana, Manish ; Johns, William E. ; Houk, Adam ; [et al.]

American Geophysical Union

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Publication Date: 2022-05-27

Description: Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 48(22), (2021): e2021GL094396, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL094396.

Description: Newly available mooring observations from the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP) show an abrupt decline in Iceland Scotland Overflow (ISOW) salinity from 2017 to 2018 summer. Previous declines in ISOW salinity of similar magnitude have largely been attributed to changes in convectively formed deep waters in the Nordic Seas on decadal time scales. We show that this rapid decline in salinity was driven by entrainment of a major upper ocean salinity anomaly in the Iceland Basin. This is shown by tracking the propagation of the upper ocean anomaly into ISOW using a combination of mooring and Argo observations, surface drifter trajectories, and numerical model results. A 2-year total transit time from the upper ocean into the ISOW layer was found. The results show that entrainment allows for rapid modification of ISOW, and consequently the lower limb of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, on subdecadal timescales.

Description: Financial support for this research was provided by the US National Science Foundation under grants OCE-1259398 and OCE-1756231. S. Zou is supported by the US National Science Foundation Grants OCE-1756361.

Description: 2022-05-15

Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server

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Observed deep cyclonic eddies around Southern Greenland (2022)

Zou, Sijia ; Bower, Amy S. ; Furey, Heather H. ; [et al.]

American Meteorological Society

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Publication Date: 2022-06-06

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2021. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 51(10), (2021): 3235–3252, https://doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-20-0288.1.

Description: Recent mooring measurements from the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program have revealed abundant cyclonic eddies at both sides of Cape Farewell, the southern tip of Greenland. In this study, we present further observational evidence, from both Eulerian and Lagrangian perspectives, of deep cyclonic eddies with intense rotation (ζ/f 〉 1) around southern Greenland and into the Labrador Sea. Most of the observed cyclones exhibit strongest rotation below the surface at 700–1000 dbar, where maximum azimuthal velocities are ~30 cm s−1 at radii of ~10 km, with rotational periods of 2–3 days. The cyclonic rotation can extend to the deep overflow water layer (below 1800 dbar), albeit with weaker azimuthal velocities (~10 cm s−1) and longer rotational periods of about one week. Within the middepth rotation cores, the cyclones are in near solid-body rotation and have the potential to trap and transport water. The first high-resolution hydrographic transect across such a cyclone indicates that it is characterized by a local (both vertically and horizontally) potential vorticity maximum in its middepth core and cold, fresh anomalies in the deep overflow water layer, suggesting its source as the Denmark Strait outflow. Additionally, the propagation and evolution of the cyclonic eddies are illustrated with deep Lagrangian floats, including their detachments from the boundary currents to the basin interior. Taken together, the combined Eulerian and Lagrangian observations have provided new insights on the boundary current variability and boundary–interior exchange over a geographically large scale near southern Greenland, calling for further investigations on the (sub)mesoscale dynamics in the region.

Description: OOI mooring data are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement 1743430. S. Zou, A. Bower, and H. Furey gratefully acknowledge the support from the Physical Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant OCE-1756361. R.S. Pickart acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Grants OCE-1259618 and OCE-1756361. N. P. Holliday and L. Houpert were supported by NERC programs U.K. OSNAP (NE/K010875) and U.K. OSNAP-Decade (NE/T00858X/1).

Keywords: North Atlantic Ocean ; Cyclogenesis/cyclolysis ; Lagrangian circulation/transport ; Mesoscale processes ; Ocean circulation

Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server

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Redrawing the Iceland−Scotland overflow water pathways in the North Atlantic (2020)

Zou, Sijia ; Bower, Amy S. ; Furey, Heather H. ; [et al.]

Nature Research

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Publication Date: 2022-05-26

Description: © The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Zou, S., Bower, A., Furey, H., Susan Lozier, M., & Xu, X. Redrawing the Iceland−Scotland overflow water pathways in the North Atlantic. Nature Communications, 11(1), (2020): 890, doi:10.1038/s41467-020-15513-4.

Description: Iceland-Scotland Overflow Water (ISOW) is a primary deep water mass exported from the Norwegian Sea into the North Atlantic as part of the global Meridional Overturning Circulation. ISOW has historically been depicted as flowing counter-clockwise in a deep boundary current around the subpolar North Atlantic, but this single-boundary-following pathway is being challenged by new Lagrangian observations and model simulations. We show here that ISOW leaves the boundary and spreads into the interior towards the central Labrador and Irminger basins after flowing through the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone. We also describe a newly observed southward pathway of ISOW along the western flank of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The partitioning of these pathways is shown to be influenced by deep-reaching eddies and meanders of the North Atlantic Current. Our results, in tandem with previous studies, call for a revision in the historical depiction of ISOW pathways throughout the North Atlantic.

Description: S.Z., A.B. and H.F. gratefully acknowledge the support from the Physical Oceanography Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (grant number OCE-17-56361). S.Z. and M.S.L. also acknowledge support from NSF-OCE-17-56143. X.X. acknowledges support from NSF award 1537136. Gratitude is also extended to C. Böning and A. Biastoch for sharing FLAME output and trajectory calculation code.

Repository Name: Woods Hole Open Access Server

Type: Article

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