Lagrangian timescales of Southern Ocean upwelling in a hierarchy of model resolutions

• Published in: Geophysical Research Letters
• Main Authors: Drake, Henri F., Morrison, Adele K., Griffies, Stephen M., Sarmiento, Jorge L., Weijer, Wilbert, Gray, Alison R.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley & Sons 2018
• Subjects: Meridional overturning circulation; Southern Ocean; Circumpolar Deep Water; Upwelling; Eddy parameterization; Ocean modeling
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/9630

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2018. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 45 (2018): 891–898, doi:10.1002/2017GL076045. In this paper we study upwelling pathways and timescales of Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) in a hierarchy of models using a Lagrangian particle tracking method. Lagrangian timescales of CDW upwelling decrease from 87 years to 31 years to 17 years as the ocean resolution is refined from 1° to 0.25° to 0.1°. We attribute some of the differences in timescale to the strength of the eddy fields, as demonstrated by temporally degrading high-resolution model velocity fields. Consistent with the timescale dependence, we find that an average Lagrangian particle completes 3.2 circumpolar loops in the 1° model in comparison to 0.9 loops in the 0.1° model. These differences suggest that advective timescales and thus interbasin merging of upwelling CDW may be overestimated by coarse-resolution models, potentially affecting the skill of centennial scale climate change projections. Department of Energy's RGCM Grant Number: DE-SC0012457; Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observation and Modeling Grant Number: PLR-1425989; Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship Grant Number: DE170100184 2018-07-31