Disruption and Formation of Arctic Staircases by Shear

• Main Authors: Brown, Justin M., Ainslie, Kristen, Radko, Timour
• Other Authors: Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
• Format: Report
• Language: unknown
• Published: ESSOAr 2021
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10945/68012

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10507244.1 Though thermohaline staircases exist in a large region of the Arctic, the interactions of such staircases with shear and turbulence are still largely unexplored. We perform a series of two- and three-dimensional simulations with and without shear and demonstrate the capacity of shear to both form and disrupt Arctic staircases. Both isotropic shear and unidirectional oscillating shear are considered. Shear is shown to disrupt staircases when the Richardson number falls below 1/4. For isotropic shear, this process works by breaking down layers individually, which leads to the gradual merging of layers, whereas the unidirectional shear tends to break down interfaces more evenly. For weaker shear (Richardson numbers greater than 2), the spontaneous development of layers is observed. OCE 1756491 National Science Foundation