100 Years of the Ocean General Circulation
Name
amsmonographs-d-18-0002.1.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
5.71 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
88396ae35b765dc127c021fafe84611f
Author(s)
Wunsch, Carl Isaac
Ferrari, Raffaele
Date Issued
January 2018
Journal
Meteorological Monographs
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
Wunsch, Carl and Raffaele Ferrari. "100 Years of the Ocean General Circulation." Meteorological Monographs, 59, American Meteorological Society, 2018, 7.1-7.32. © 2018 American Meteorological Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The central change in understanding of the ocean circulation during the past 100 years has been its emergence as an intensely time-dependent, effectively turbulent and wave-dominated, flow. Early technologies for making the difficult observations were adequate only to depict large-scale, quasi-steady flows. With the electronic revolution of the past 50+ years, the emergence of geophysical fluid dynamics, the strongly inhomogeneous time-dependent nature of oceanic circulation physics finally emerged. Mesoscale (balanced), submesoscale oceanic eddies at 100-km horizontal scales and shorter, and internal waves are now known to be central to much of the behavior of the system. Ocean circulation is now recognized to involve both eddies and larger-scale flows with dominant elements and their interactions varying among the classical gyres, the boundary current regions, the Southern Ocean, and the tropics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1175/amsmonographs-d-18-0002.1
