2012 Project Summary The Contributions of Ocean Circulation to North Atlantic SST

• Main Authors: Pis Kathryn Kelly, Suzanne Dickinson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Weller; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.433.3984; http://www.usclivar.org/sites/default/files/amoc/Kelly_a_2012AMOC_projsum.pdf

The goal of this project is to determine the importance of various components of advection to interannual sea surface temperature anomalies in different regions of the North Atlantic Ocean, in particular, whether advection contributes to such large-‐scale SST patterns as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). We run the Price-‐Weller-‐Pinkel one-‐dimensional mixed layer model and add Ekman and geostrophic advection using observed SST gradients. Surface values of velocity and SST gradients are extended downward using climatological estimates. Recent Results (1) The PWP model was run for 7 years down to 1500m forced at the surface with heat, momentum and fresh water fluxes, and laterally with geostrophic and Ekman advection of temperature and salinity. The model was restarted with climatology for each year. Various combinations of either velocity or temperature gradient anomalies were removed and the modeled SST was compared with the full baseline runs. Errors caused by neglect of each term were compared using a Taylor diagram (a normalized SST error as a fraction of SST variance) to evaluate the importance of the term. Six regions in the North Atlantic were