 |
Oceanography Brown Bag Seminar
Observations of the North Atlantic
Subtropical Mode Water
Young-Oh Kwon
Wednesday,
April 7, 2004
12:00 noon – 1:00 p.m.
NCAR Mesa Lab, Chapman Room
Abstract
The Eighteen Degree Water (EDW), also often called the North Atlantic
Subtropical Mode Water, is a product of major atmosphere-ocean interaction
along the Gulf Stream that carries imprinted signal of climate variability
through a shallow overturning circulation in a few hundred meters of the
upper ocean. Compared to the global deep meridional overturning
circulation, this shallow overturning circulation with a turn-over time of
about 3-5 years is a potential contributor to the climate variability in
an interannual to decadal time scale.
In this
talk, basic characteristics of the EDW, e.g. mean seasonal cycle, annual
production and destruction rate, variability in the strength and location
of the formation with respect to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO),
will be discussed based on the hydrography and subsurface velocity
observations using 71 World Ocean Circulation Experiment/Atlantic
Circulation and Climate Experiment (WOCE/ACCE) profiling floats during
July, 1997 - December, 2002. Low frequency variability of the EDW and its
relation to the upper ocean heat content and the NAO will be also examined
using 40-year time series of EDW volume, temperature and heat content,
which were reconstructed based on historical temperature profiles from the
World Ocean Atlas 2001.
For more information, contact: Lisa
Butler
|
