Unsupervised classification identifies coherent thermohaline structures in the Weddell Gyre region ...

• Main Authors: Jones, Dani, Sonnewald, Maike, Zhou, Shenjie, Hausmann, Ute, Meijers, Andrew, Rosso, Isabella, Boehme, Lars, Meredith, Michael, Naveira Garabato, Alberto
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences 2023
• Subjects: Southern Ocean; Weddell; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.57757/iugg23-0136; https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5016414

<!--!introduction!--> The Weddell Gyre is a prominent feature of the Southern Ocean and an important component of the planetary climate system; it regulates air-sea exchanges, controls the formation of deep and bottom waters, and hosts upwelling of relatively warm subsurface waters. It is characterised by extremely low sea surface temperatures, ubiquitous sea ice formation, and widespread salt stratification. At present, the remote and often sea-ice-covered Weddell Gyre is one of the most poorly-sampled regions of the global ocean, highlighting the need to extract as much information as possible from existing observations. Here, we apply a profile classification model (PCM), which is an unsupervised classification technique, to a Weddell Gyre profile dataset to identify coherent regimes in temperature and salinity. We find that, despite not being given any positional information, PCM identifies four spatially coherent thermohaline domains that can be described as follows: (1) a circumpolar class, (2) a ... : The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023) ...