Dense water formation on the northwestern shelf of the Okhotsk Sea: 2. Quantifying the transports

• Main Authors: Andrey Y. Shcherbina, Lynne D. Talley, Daniel L. Rudnick
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Okhotsk; okhotsk sea
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.527.2267; http://www-pord.ucsd.edu/~ltalley/papers/2000s/shcherbina_okhotsk2_2003JC002197.pdf

[1] A combination of direct bottom mooring measurements, hydrographic and satellite observations, and meteorological reanalysis was used to estimate the rate of formation of Dense Shelf Water (DSW) due to brine rejection on the Okhotsk Sea northwestern shelf and the rate of export of DSW from this region. On the basis of remote sensing data, an estimated 8.6 1012 m3 of DSW was formed during the winter of 1999–2000, resulting in a mean annual production rate of 0.3 Sv. According to direct observations, the export rate of DSW during this period varied from negligibly small in autumn to 0.75 ± 0.27 Sv in winter (January–February), to 0.34 ± 0.12 Sv in spring (March–April). From these observations the mean annual export rate can be estimated to be 0.27 Sv. The same relationships used to obtain the integral estimates were also applied differentially using an advective approach incorporating realistic flow and heat flux fields, which allowed direct comparison with the moored observations. The comparison highlights the importance of along-shelf advection and cross-shelf eddy transport to the accurate