A tale of two spicy seas

• Published in: Oceanography
• Main Authors: MacKinnon, Jennifer A., Nash, Jonathan D., Alford, Matthew H., Lucas, Andrew J., Mickett, John B., Shroyer, Emily L., Waterhouse, Amy F., Tandon, Amit, Sengupta, Debasis, Mahadevan, Amala, Ravichandran, M., Pinkel, Robert, Rudnick, Daniel L., Whalen, Caitlin B., Alberty, Marion S., Lekha, J. Sree, Fine, Elizabeth C., Chaudhuri, Dipayan, Wagner, Gregory L.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The Oceanography Society 2016
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/8302

Author Posting. © The Oceanography Society, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of The Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 29, no. 2 (2016): 50–61, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2016.38. Upper-ocean turbulent heat fluxes in the Bay of Bengal and the Arctic Ocean drive regional monsoons and sea ice melt, respectively, important issues of societal interest. In both cases, accurate prediction of these heat transports depends on proper representation of the small-scale structure of vertical stratification, which in turn is created by a host of complex submesoscale processes. Though half a world apart and having dramatically different temperatures, there are surprising similarities between the two: both have (1) very fresh surface layers that are largely decoupled from the ocean below by a sharp halocline barrier, (2) evidence of interleaving lateral and vertical gradients that set upper-ocean stratification, and (3) vertical turbulent heat fluxes within the upper ocean that respond sensitively to these structures. However, there are clear differences in each ocean’s horizontal scales of variability, suggesting that despite similar background states, the sharpening and evolution of mesoscale gradients at convergence zones plays out quite differently. Here, we conduct a qualitative and statistical comparison of these two seas, with the goal of bringing to light fundamental underlying dynamics that will hopefully improve the accuracy of forecast models in both parts of the world. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Ocean Mixing and Monsoon (OMM) program of the Monsoon Mission of India.