Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2006. 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 33 (2006): L13608, doi:10.1029/2006GL026311.
Description:
Austral winter oceanographic measurements from the northwest Australian continental
shelf reveal salty water forming evaporatively inshore, moving across the wide shelf near
the bottom and into the adjacent open ocean when the shelf edge alongshore flow is
equatorward. The salt tongue is absent during more normal conditions, when the
poleward Leeuwin Current is present. We hypothesize that the flow reversal enables
shelf-wide bottom boundary layer (Ekman) transport and thus creates the shelf-edge
convergence that accounts for the observed salt tongue. This flow is absent under
sustained normal conditions because of buoyancy arrest in the bottom boundary layer.
Description:
This research was supported by the Processes and Prediction Division (Code 322 PO) of
the U.S. Office of Naval Research through grant N00014-02-1-0767.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
