Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2005. 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 II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 53 (2006): 172-193, doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2005.10.019.
Description:
The sensitivity of the basin-scale ocean stratification to the vertical distribution of plume entrainment is being analyzed. A large ocean basin supplied by dense water from an adjoining marginal sea is considered. The dense water flows into the ocean basin as an entraining density current and
interleaves at the bottom (or at the level of neutral density), where it deposits a mixture of marginal seaand basin water. As the basin water, i.e. 'old' plume water, is entrained and re-circulated in the plume a
stratification develops in the basin. The mixture deposited at the bottom hence contains an increasing fraction of marginal sea water, and the basin density increases with depth as well as with time. A
stationary solution in which diffusion of buoyancy from above is important is approached asymptotically in time.
Non-diffusive solutions to the initial transient adjustment, as well as the diffusive asymptotic state, have been studied in four different parameterizations of plume entrainment. It is shown that in the
transient regime the basin stratification and plume density are highly sensitive to how mixing is parameterized. The stationary diffusive solution that is approached asymptotically in time is less
sensitive to parameterization but depends strongly on basin topography, source water density, and buoyancy flux at the surface.
Description:
Part of this work was funded by Göteborg University and the Swedish Research Council under the contract G600-335/2001 through Prof. A. Omstedt. Support was given to CC by the National Science Foundation project number OCE-0050891.
Keywords:
Overflows
;
Plumes
;
Mixing parameterization
;
Ekman transport
;
Advective-diffusive balance
;
Filling box models
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
715389 bytes
Format:
960696 bytes
Format:
application/pdf
Format:
application/pdf
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