Antarctic climate: ocean fluxes and variability

• Main Author: Williams, Adam Peter
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Drake Passage; Antarc*; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/63753/; https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/63753/1/Williams_A_2008_PhD.pdf

The Southern Ocean plays a major role in the global overturning circulation, providing an important route for the return flow of deep water subducted in the North Atlantic. The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) provided an unprecedented picture of the state of the world’s oceans and set new standards for high quality in-situ hydrographic data. This study combines the existing WOCE data set with new hydrographic sections, and output from global and regional ocean models to examine the mean state of the Southern Ocean circulation and the balance of fluxes around the Antarctic Circumpolar current. A historical data set in the region of Drake Passage is examined to study the large-scale water mass variability between 1926-2005. The water mass properties of the Lower Circumpolar Deep Water is constant within error bounds throughout the data set. A warming and freshening signal in the surface waters from 1997-2005 to the north of the Sub-Antarctic Front along SR01b is also presented. The major part of this work is based around an inverse study of the Southern Ocean that combines the WOCE data-set with contemporary sections, and other forcing fields to examine the balance of fluxes throughout the Southern Ocean. The study examines the effect of different parameterisations of the dianeutral mixing in the Southern Ocean, in light of the differing views of localised deep turbulent mixing from observations, and an adiabatic ocean interior from residual mean studies, The freshwater balance in the model is presented and its implications on the water mass formation and transformation of the upper and lower cells of the overturning circulation is discussed in detail.