Particle tracking dataset for: Exceptional 20th century ocean circulation in the Northeast Atlantic

• Main Authors: Fox, Alan D., Spooner, Peter T.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Northeast Atlantic
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/3727170; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3727170

Particle tracking data for: "Exceptional 20th century ocean circulation in the Northeast Atlantic" Peter T. Spooner, David J. R. Thornalley, Delia W. Oppo, Alan Fox, Svetlana Radionovskaya, Neil L. Rose, Robbie Mallett, Emma Cooper, J. Murray Roberts VIKING20 (is a 1/20th degree ocean model, forced by a hindcast simulation of the atmosphere: CORE2 (Griffies et al., 2009). The reverse tracks of 113200 particles per year for 50 years, (1959-2009) were simulated with the ARIANE software (Döös, 1995) modified to include independent vertical motion of particles. Particles were seeded at the seabed in 10 km x 10 km boxes centered on MC16-A/17-5P and RAPID-21-3K (representing the settling location). The reverse tracks 'rose' (sinking) at 100 m/day (Takahashi & Be, 1984) and were then allowed to drift freely within the upper 100 m of the water column for six months (i.e. spanning the reasonable lifespan for many species of planktic foraminifera). Track data for the full 50 years are stored in a single netcdf file (output of ncdump -h <filename> given below). The 3D particle positions are in variables traj_lon, traj_lat and traj_depth with the Viking20 model along-track temperature, salinity and density in traj_temp, temp_sal and traj_dens, respectively. The main complication is the obscure storage of time (see also ARIANE software documentation). Variable init_t gives particle start time, counting in 5-day periods from 12:00 pm on 29 December 1957. Viking20 uses a fixed 365 day year so the year can be found for track 'traj' according to: year = 1958 + ( (init_t(traj)-1) \ 73 ) where '\' represents integer division, discarding the remainder. All particle tracks 'begin' (actually the end of the track in time as these are tracked backwards) at the start of July (12:00 pm July 1 in model). Particles are ordered by release time, so trajectories 1-113200 are 1959; 113201-226400 are 1960; etc. Positions are stored every 5 days, counting backwards. Further details are available from the authors. References Döös, K. ...