Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Elsevier B.V., 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers 55 (2008): 737-750, doi:10.1016/j.dsr.2008.02.007.
Description:
The continental slopes in the oceans are often covered by small-scale topographic
features such as submarine canyons and ridges. When dense plumes, flowing
geostrophically along the slope, encounter such features they may be steered downslope
inside and alongside the topography. A set of laboratory experiments was conducted at
the rotating Coriolis platform to investigate the effect of small-scale topography on plume
mixing. A dense water source was placed on top of a slope, and experiments were
repeated with three topographies: a smooth slope, a slope with a ridge, and a slope with a
canyon. Three flow regimes were studied: laminar, waves, and eddies. When a ridge or a
canyon were present on the slope, the dense plume was steered downslope and
instabilities developed along the ridge and canyon wall. This happened regardless of the
flow characteristics on the smooth slope. Froude and Reynolds numbers were estimated,
and were found to be higher for the topographically steered flow than for flow on smooth
topography. The stratification in the collecting basin was monitored and the mixing
inferred. The total mixing and the entrainment rate increased when a ridge or a canyon
were present. The difference in mixing levels between the regimes was smaller when
topography was present, indicating that it was the small-scale topography and not the
large-scale characteristics of the flow that determined the properties of the product water.
Description:
AW was funded by the Swedish Research Council and ED in part by Meltzer
Stiftelsen, for which we are grateful. CC was supported by an NSF grant OCE-0085089.
The work described in this publication was supported by the European Community's
Sixth Framework Programme through the grant to the budget of the Integrated
Infrastructure Initiative HYDRALAB III, Contract no. 022441 (RII3).
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
application/pdf
