Lagrangian transport across the upper Arctic waters in the Canadian Basin

The goal of this paper is to study transport, from a Lagrangian perspective, across selected circulation patterns in the upper Arctic Ocean waters. To this end, we apply the methodology of Lagrangian descriptors, using the function M, to the velocity field dataset provided by the Copernicus Marine E...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
Main Authors: Balibrea-Iniesta, F., Xie, Jiping, García-Garrido, Víctor José, Bertino, Laurent, Wiggins, S., Mancho, Ana María
Other Authors: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España)
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Royal Meteorological Society (Great Britain) 2019
Subjects:
Lagrangian transport
dynamical systems tools
hyperbolic trajectory
invariant manifolds
Lagrangian descriptors
data assimilation
Arctic
Arctic Ocean
Garrido
Arctic Basin
Beaufort Sea
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/200923
https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3404
https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003329
Description
Summary:The goal of this paper is to study transport, from a Lagrangian perspective, across selected circulation patterns in the upper Arctic Ocean waters. To this end, we apply the methodology of Lagrangian descriptors, using the function M, to the velocity field dataset provided by the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service. We focus our analysis on the Arctic region in the halocline (top 30 meters depth), which is based on particular events occurring over the 2012-2016 time period. The advantage of the Lagrangian descriptor is that it highlights large-scale persistent dynamical structures related to mathematical objects known as invariant manifolds, which determine fluid transport and mixing processes. These geometrical flow structures play a crucial role in the evolution of the freshwater content observed over the Arctic basin. In this work, we identify these dynamical structures in the Beaufort Sea and show how they mediate transport processes according to a clockwise circulating pattern, related to the Beaufort Gyre (BG). Additionally, this approach highlights the Transpolar Drift Stream (TDS) as a transport barrier which maintains the salinity gradient between the Canadian basin and the Atlantic waters. Our approach also illustrates the variability of the intensity of the TDS during the analyzed period and identifies secondary currents that feed it. F. Balibrea-Iniesta, V. J. Garc´ıa-Garrido and A. M. Mancho are supported by MINECO grants MTM2014-56392-R and 420 SEV-2011-0087 and ONR grant N00014-17-1-3003. They thank to CESGA and ICMAT for computing facilities. F. Balibrea- 421 Iniesta and A. M. Mancho acknowledge a STSM at NERSC funded by ESSEM COST Action ES1402. L. Bertino and J. 422 Xie acknowledge grants of CPU time and data storage from the Norwegian supercomputing project Sigma2 with numbers 423 nn2993k and ns2993k. The research of S. Wiggins is supported by ONR grant No. N00014- 01-1-0769.

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