| Summary: | of a doctoral dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor Eric P. Chassignet. No. of pages in text 136 In this dissertation work, the processes responsible for the observed interannual and near-decadal variability in the mode waters of the North Atlantic Ocean are investigated, in particular those related to the renewal of Subtropical Mode Water (STMW) and Labrador Sea Water (LSW). This study is carried out within the framework of numerical simulations performed with an Ocean General Circulation Model (the Miami Isopycnic Coordinate Ocean Model - MICOM), under realistic boundary forcing. First, the constraints imposed upon the model thermodynamic adjustment by the formulation of the surface and lateral forcing are explored in detail, in a series of experiments under climatological boundary conditions. Relaxation of model properties to climatology at the oceanic boundaries (buffer zones) is found to be a robust approach in MICOM. Different surface heat .
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