100 Years of the Ocean General Circulation

• Published in: Meteorological Monographs
• Main Authors: Wunsch, Carl Isaac, Ferrari, Raffaele
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Meteorological Society 2020
• Subjects: Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129466

The central change in understanding of the ocean circulation during the past 100 years has been its emergence as an intensely time-dependent, effectively turbulent and wave-dominated, flow. Early technologies for making the difficult observations were adequate only to depict large-scale, quasi-steady flows. With the electronic revolution of the past 50+ years, the emergence of geophysical fluid dynamics, the strongly inhomogeneous time-dependent nature of oceanic circulation physics finally emerged. Mesoscale (balanced), submesoscale oceanic eddies at 100-km horizontal scales and shorter, and internal waves are now known to be central to much of the behavior of the system. Ocean circulation is now recognized to involve both eddies and larger-scale flows with dominant elements and their interactions varying among the classical gyres, the boundary current regions, the Southern Ocean, and the tropics.