The Force Balance of the Southern Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation
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Mazloff-2013-The Force Balance of.pdf
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4.9 MB
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Author(s)
Mazloff, Matthew R.
Ferrari, Raffaele
Schneider, Tapio
Date Issued
June 2013
Journal
Journal of Physical Oceanography
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
Mazloff, Matthew R., Raffaele Ferrari, and Tapio Schneider. “The Force Balance of the Southern Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation.” J. Phys. Oceanogr. 43, no. 6 (June 2013): 1193–1208. © 2013 American Meteorological Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The Southern Ocean (SO) limb of the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) is characterized by three vertically stacked cells, each with a transport of about 10 Sv (Sv ≡ 10[superscript 6] m[superscript 3] s[superscript −1]). The buoyancy transport in the SO is dominated by the upper and middle MOC cells, with the middle cell accounting for most of the buoyancy transport across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. A Southern Ocean state estimate for the years 2005 and 2006 with 1/6° resolution is used to determine the forces balancing this MOC. Diagnosing the zonal momentum budget in density space allows an exact determination of the adiabatic and diapycnal components balancing the thickness-weighted (residual) meridional transport. It is found that, to lowest order, the transport consists of an eddy component, a directly wind-driven component, and a component in balance with mean pressure gradients. Nonvanishing time-mean pressure gradients arise because isopycnal layers intersect topography or the surface in a circumpolar integral, leading to a largely geostrophic MOC even in the latitude band of Drake Passage. It is the geostrophic water mass transport in the surface layer where isopycnals outcrop that accomplishes the poleward buoyancy transport.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1175/jpo-d-12-069.1
