Seasonality in submesoscale turbulence

Jörn Callies (), Raffaele Ferrari, Jody M. Klymak and Jonathan Gula
Additional contact information
Jörn Callies: MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Building 54-1615, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge/Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02139, USA
Raffaele Ferrari: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jody M. Klymak: University of Victoria
Jonathan Gula: University of California

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Although the strongest ocean surface currents occur at horizontal scales of order 100 km, recent numerical simulations suggest that flows smaller than these mesoscale eddies can achieve important vertical transports in the upper ocean. These submesoscale flows, 1–100 km in horizontal extent, take heat and atmospheric gases down into the interior ocean, accelerating air–sea fluxes, and bring deep nutrients up into the sunlit surface layer, fueling primary production. Here we present observational evidence that submesoscale flows undergo a seasonal cycle in the surface mixed layer: they are much stronger in winter than in summer. Submesoscale flows are energized by baroclinic instabilities that develop around geostrophic eddies in the deep winter mixed layer at a horizontal scale of order 1–10 km. Flows larger than this instability scale are energized by turbulent scale interactions. Enhanced submesoscale activity in the winter mixed layer is expected to achieve efficient exchanges with the permanent thermocline below.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7862 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms7862

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7862

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().