Routes of the Upper Branch of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation according to an Ocean State Estimate
Name
Geophysical Research Letters - 2020 - Rousselet - Routes of the Upper Branch of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.07 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Rousselet, Louise
Cessi, Paola
Forget, Gael
Date Issued
August 30, 2020
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
Citation
Rousselet, L., Cessi, P., & Forget, G. (2020). Routes of the upper branch of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation according to an ocean state estimate. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL089137.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The origins of the upper branch of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) are traced with backward-in-time Lagrangian trajectories, quantifying the partition of volume transport between different routes of entry from the Indo-Pacific into the Atlantic. Particles are advected by the velocity field from a recent release of “Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean” (ECCOv4). This global time-variable velocity field is a dynamically consistent interpolation of over 1 billion oceanographic observations collected between 1992 and 2015. Of the 13.6 Sverdrups (1 Sv = 106 m3/s) flowing northward across 6°S, 15% enters the Atlantic from Drake Passage, 35% enters from the straits between Asia and Australia (Indonesian Throughflow), and 49% comes from the region south of Australia (Tasman Leakage). Because of blending in the Agulhas region, water mass properties in the South Atlantic are not a good indicator of origin.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl089137
