Eddy flux of Atlantic Water to the Eurasian Basin North of Svalbard

• Main Authors: Perez-Hernandez, M., Pickart, R., Sundfjord, A., Ingvaldsen, R., Renner, A., Pavlov, V.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Arctic; Svalbard
• Online Access: https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5019585

The Svalbard branch of the Atlantic Water (AW) flows eastward north of Svalbard carrying warm and salty waters along the slope of the Arctic Eurasian Basin. Recent studies have shown that this current is baroclinically unstable and sheds eddies into the basin. Here we use data from a mooring array deployed near 30°E between September 2012 and September 2013 to explore the eddies shed from the boundary current. The instrument coverage extended down to 1200‐m depth and meridionally to approximately 50 km offshore of the shelfbreak, which laterally bracketed the flow. The moorings contained conductivity-temperature-depth profilers that sampled the water column every 12 hours and acoustic Doppler current profilers that sampled the water column every hour. Eddies were present throughout the year and reached down to 600m depth, some of them embedded within the pycnocline. The study is carried out using two different methodologies to describe the eddies: an empirical orthogonal function analysis of the vertical sections of velocity, and case studies of eddy events in different seasons.