Introduction to special section: World Ocean Circulation Experiment: Southern Ocean results

• Main Author: King, B.A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2001
• Subjects: Antarctic; Indian; Pacific; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/107930/; http://www.agu.org/journals/jc/jc0102/2000JC900152/0.html

This special section of Journal of Geophysical Research contains a collection of papers on the Southern Ocean, presenting results that have emerged during the late phase of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). Previous special sections have included papers with Pacific results (World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), Journal of Geophysical Research, 103, 12,897-13,092, 1998) and South Atlantic results (WOCE South Atlantic Results, Journal of Geophysical Research, 104, 20,859-21,226, 1999). As before, this special section was stimulated by a WOCE basin workshop: the WOCE Southern Ocean workshop was held at the Antarctic CRC in Hobart, Tasmania, in July 1997. However, the correspondence between results presented at the workshop and papers that were subsequently submitted to the section is not as close as for the other workshops. Rather, this section represents a selection of Southern Ocean results that happened to be ready in the right time frame. A first glance at the papers shows that a majority of them deal with in situ observations. The Pacific, South Atlantic, and Indian Basins had coherent measurement programs, rather concentrated in time. In contrast, the WOCE Southern Ocean observational program was less coordinated, even though the Southern Ocean was the subject of one of the WOCE Core Projects. Southern Ocean measurements were often made as part of cruises for which the focus was one of the Southern Hemisphere basins mentioned above. Data and results have therefore emerged at a more or less even rate throughout WOCE, which accounts in part for why such a snapshot selection like this one cannot be really representative. The special section contains twelve papers. Of these, at least nine are principally concerned with observations. This balance between results from measurement programs and results from modeling efforts is probably representative of interest expressed at the Hobart workshop. So why might modeling be underrepresented in a collection of papers with a Southern Ocean focus? ...