New perspectives on eighteen-degree water formation in the North Atlantic

• Published in: Journal of Oceanography
• Main Author: Joyce, Terrence M.
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/5066

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Oceanography 68 (2012): 45-52, doi:10.1007/s10872-011-0029-0. In this report, Eighteen Degree Water (EDW) formation will be discussed, with emphasis on advances in understanding emerging within the past decade. In particular, a recently completed field study of EDW (CLIMODE) is suggesting that EDW formation within a given winter can have at least two different dominant physics and distinct locations: one type formed in the northern Sargasso Sea, largely away from the strong flows of the Gulf Stream where 1D physics may apply, and a second type formed along the southern flank of the Gulf Stream, in a region where the background vorticity of the flow and cross-frontal mixing plays a key role in the convective formation process. National Science Foundation (OCE 0959387) 2012-06-06