Journal article
Eddy Saturation of the Southern Ocean: A Baroclinic Versus Barotropic Perspective
NC Constantinou, AMC Hogg
Geophysical Research Letters | Published : 2019
DOI: 10.1029/2019GL084117
Abstract
“Eddy saturation” is the regime in which the total time-mean volume transport of an oceanic current is relatively insensitive to the wind stress forcing and is often invoked as a dynamical description of Southern Ocean circulation. We revisit the problem of eddy saturation using a primitive equations model in an idealized channel setup with bathymetry. We apply only mechanical wind stress forcing; there is no diapycnal mixing or surface buoyancy forcing. Our main aim is to assess the relative importance of two mechanisms for producing eddy-saturated states: (i) the commonly invoked baroclinic mechanism that involves the competition of sloping isopycnals and restratification by production of ..
View full abstractRelated Projects (1)
Grants
Funding Acknowledgements
We acknowledge fruitful discussions with Louis-Phillipe Nadeau, Callum Shakespeare, Kial Stewart, and William Young. We appreciate the constructive review comments by Dave Munday and an anonymous reviewer. Furthermore, N. C. C. is indebted to Alistair Adcroft, Angus Gibson, Bob Hallberg, and Aidan Heerdegen for their help regarding using MOM6. Numerical simulations were conducted on the Australian National Computational Infrastructure at ANU, which is supported by the Commonwealth of Australia. MOM6 code is available online (https://github.com/NOAA-GFDL/MOM6).The model setup for the experiments presented can be found online (https://github.com/navidcy/EddySaturation-MOM6/).Model output is available online (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3246030).Scripts for producing figures are also available online (https://github.com/navidcy/EddySaturation-BtBc-GRL).