Arctic pathways of Pacific Water: Arctic Ocean model intercomparison experiments

Pacific Water (PW) enters the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait and brings heat, fresh water and nutrients from the northern Bering Sea. The circulation of PW in the central Arctic Ocean is only partially understood due to the lack of observations. In this paper pathways of PW are investigated usin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
Main Authors: Aksenov, Yevgeny, Karcher, Michael, Proshutinsky, Andrey, Gerdes, Rüdiger, de Cuevas, Beverly, Golubeva, Elena, Kauker, Frank, Nguyen, An T., Platov, Gennady A., Wadley, Martin, Watanabe, Eiji, Coward, Andrew C., Nurser, A.J. George
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2016
Subjects:
Marine Sciences
Arctic
Arctic Ocean
Bering Sea
Baffin Bay
Bering Strait
Canada
Greenland
Pacific
East Siberian Sea
Chukchi Shelf
Barrow Canyon
Baffin
Barrow
canada basin
Central Arctic
Chukchi
Fram Strait
Greenland Sea
Alaska
Online Access:http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/512124/
https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/512124/7/jgrc21458.pdf
https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/512124/1/Aksenov_et_al-2015-Journal_of_Geophysical_Research__Oceans.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JC011299
Description
Summary:Pacific Water (PW) enters the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait and brings heat, fresh water and nutrients from the northern Bering Sea. The circulation of PW in the central Arctic Ocean is only partially understood due to the lack of observations. In this paper pathways of PW are investigated using simulations with six state-of-the art regional and global Ocean General Circulation Models (OGCMs). In the simulations PW is tracked by a passive tracer, released in Bering Strait. Simulated PW water spreads from the Bering Strait region in three major branches. One of them starts in the Barrow Canyon, bringing PW along continental slope of Alaska into the Canadian Straits and then into Baffin Bay. The other initiates in the vicinity of the Herald Canyon and transports PW along the continental slope of the East-Siberian Sea into the transpolar drift, and then through Fram Strait and the Greenland Sea. The third branch begins near the Herald Shoal and the central Chukchi shelf and brings PW waters into the Beaufort Gyre. Models suggest that the spread of PW through the Arctic Ocean depends on the atmospheric circulation. In the models the wind, acting via Ekman pumping, drives the seasonal and interannual variability of PW in the Canadian Basin of the Arctic Ocean. The wind effects the simulated PW pathways by changing vertical shear of the relative vorticity of the ocean flow in the Canada Basin.

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