Surface expression of a wall fountain: application to subglacial discharge plumes

• Published in: Journal of Physical Oceanography
• Main Authors: McConnochie, Craig D., Cenedese, Claudia, McElwaine, Jim N.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Meteorological Society 2020
• Subjects: Ocean; Glaciers; Ice sheets; Convection; Laboratory/physical models; Greenland; glacier
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/25922

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 50(5), (2020): 1245-1263, doi:10.1175/JPO-D-19-0213.1. We use laboratory experiments and theoretical modeling to investigate the surface expression of a subglacial discharge plume, as occurs at many fjords around Greenland. The experiments consider a fountain that is released vertically into a homogeneous fluid, adjacent either to a vertical or a sloping wall, that then spreads horizontally at the free surface before sinking back to the bottom. We present a model that separates the fountain into two separate regions: a vertical fountain and a horizontal, negatively buoyant jet. The model is compared to laboratory experiments that are conducted over a range of volume fluxes, density differences, and ambient fluid depths. It is shown that the nondimensionalized length, width, and aspect ratio of the surface expression are dependent on the Froude number, calculated at the start of the negatively buoyant jet. The model is applied to observations of the surface expression from a Greenland subglacial discharge plume. In the case where the discharge plume reaches the surface with negative buoyancy the model can be used to estimate the discharge properties at the base of the glacier. We gratefully acknowledge technical assistance from Anders Jensen and thank anonymous reviewers for improving the clarity of the manuscript. CM thanks the Weston Howard Jr. Scholarship for funding. Support to CC was given by NSF project OCE-1434041 and OCE-1658079. 2020-10-27