A Feature Model for Arctic Upper Ocean Thermal Structure

• Main Author: Chu, Peter C.
• Other Authors: NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA DEPT OF OCEANOGRAPHY
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1995
• Subjects: Meteorology; Physical and Dynamic Oceanography; Thermodynamics; *SURFACE TEMPERATURE; *ICE; *OCEAN SURFACE; *ARCTIC OCEAN; SNOW; EARTH SURFACE; MIXED LAYER(MARINE); SALINITY; HIGH LATITUDES; WATER MASSES; ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY; ALBEDO; ICE FORMATION; ENVIRONMENTS; RADIATION; DATA BASES; POLAR REGIONS; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; albedo
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA530525; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA530525

The radiation balance at high latitudes is dominated by presence or absence of snow and ice which affects the albedo in a great deal. Any oceanic processes that affect the snow and ice cover in polar regions will cause the change of deposition of sun's energy over the earth's surface, and hence the environmental change. Besides, the ice cover, ocean, and atmosphere exchange water mass and energy in a very complicated way. Three major feedback loops (both positive and negative), in which the upper ocean is a key component, possibly exist in a theoretical air-ice-ocean coupled system (Chu, 1990). Thus, investigation of the polar upper ocean thermal structure from observation becomes urgent. Up until now, the effort is limited to study some individual data set, e.g., AIDJEX, MIZEX, CEAREX, etc., separately. No investigation is pursued for the Arctic upper ocean thermal structure from the all available data sets. This study deals with the most complete temperature and salinity data sets in the Arctic Ocean, which is the U.S. Navy's Master Oceanographic Data sets (MOODS). To get physical insights from the data, we use a feature model (Haeger, 1994) to transfer each MOODS Arctic temperature (or salinity) profile into a set of several characteristics: sea surface temperature (SST), mixed layer depth, thermocline depth, temperature difference across the thermocline. These characteristics reveal strong term poral and spatial variabilities. Presented at the Conference on Polar Meteorology and Oceanography, American Meteorological Society (4th), 224-227, 1995.