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North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) is a deep water mass formed in the North Atlantic Ocean. Thermohaline circulation of the world's oceans involves the flow of warm surface waters from the southern hemisphere into the North Atlantic. Water flowing northward becomes modified through evaporation and mixing with other water masses, leading to increased salinity. When this water reaches the North Atlantic it cools and sinks through convection, due to its decreased temperature and increased salinity resulting in increased density. NADW is the outflow of this thick deep layer, which can be detected by its high salinity, high oxygen content, nutrient minima, high 14C/12C, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
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An ocean current is a continuous, directed movement of seawater generated by a number of forces acting upon the water, including wind, the Coriolis effect, breaking waves, cabbeling, and temperature and salinity differences. Depth contours, shoreline configurations, and interactions with other currents influence a current's direction and strength. Ocean currents are primarily horizontal water movements.
The Agulhas Current is the western boundary current of the southwest Indian Ocean. It flows south along the east coast of Africa from 27°S to 40°S. It is narrow, swift and strong. It is suggested that it is the largest western boundary current in the world ocean, with an estimated net transport of 70 sverdrups, as western boundary currents at comparable latitudes transport less — Brazil Current, Gulf Stream, Kuroshio.
The Benguela Current is the broad, northward flowing ocean current that forms the eastern portion of the South Atlantic Ocean gyre. The current extends from roughly Cape Point in the south, to the position of the Angola-Benguela front in the north, at around 16°S. The current is driven by the prevailing south easterly trade winds. Inshore of the Benguela Current proper, the south easterly winds drive coastal upwelling, forming the Benguela Upwelling System. The cold, nutrient rich waters that upwell from around 200–300 m (656–984 ft) depth in turn fuel high rates of phytoplankton growth, and sustain the productive Benguela ecosystem.
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A circumpolar vortex, or simply polar vortex, is a large region of cold, rotating air; polar vortices encircle both of Earth's polar regions. Polar vortices also exist on other rotating, low-obliquity planetary bodies. The term polar vortex can be used to describe two distinct phenomena; the stratospheric polar vortex, and the tropospheric polar vortex. The stratospheric and tropospheric polar vortices both rotate in the direction of the Earth's spin, but they are distinct phenomena that have different sizes, structures, seasonal cycles, and impacts on weather.
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The North Atlantic Gyre of the Atlantic Ocean is one of five great oceanic gyres. It is a circular ocean current, with offshoot eddies and sub-gyres, across the North Atlantic from the Intertropical Convergence Zone to the part south of Iceland, and from the east coasts of North America to the west coasts of Europe and Africa.
The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) was the first of ESA's Living Planet Programme heavy satellites intended to map in unprecedented detail the Earth's gravity field. The spacecraft's primary instrumentation was a highly sensitive gravity gradiometer consisting of three pairs of accelerometers which measured gravitational gradients along three orthogonal axes.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a system of surface-level and deep currents in the Atlantic Ocean which are driven both by changes in the atmospheric weather and thermohaline changes in temperature and salinity. These currents collectively make up one half of the global thermohaline circulation that encompasses the flow of major ocean currents. The other half is the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, and both play highly important roles in the climate system.
The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), also known as Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV), is the theorized variability of the sea surface temperature (SST) of the North Atlantic Ocean on the timescale of several decades.
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Axel Timmermann is a German climate physicist and oceanographer with an interest in climate dynamics, human migration, dynamical systems' analysis, ice-sheet modeling and sea level. He served a co-author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report and a lead author of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. His research has been cited over 18,000 times and has an h-index of 70 and i10-index of 161. In 2017, he became a Distinguished Professor at Pusan National University and the founding Director of the Institute for Basic Science Center for Climate Physics. In December 2018, the Center began to utilize a 1.43-petaflop Cray XC50 supercomputer, named Aleph, for climate physics research.
Delia Wanda Oppo is an American scientist who works on paleoceanography where she focuses on past variations in water circulation and the subsequent impact on Earth's climate system. She was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2014.
The Agulhas Leakage is an inflow of anomalously warm and saline water from the Indian Ocean into the South Atlantic due to the limited latitudinal extent of the African continent compared to the southern extension of the subtropical super gyre in the Indian Ocean. The process occurs during the retroflection of the Agulhas Current via shedding of anticyclonic Agulhas Rings, cyclonic eddies and direct inflow. The leakage contributes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) by supplying its upper limb, which has direct climate implications.
References
- ↑ "PL24C-2676 - The Mann Eddy: formation and interaction with the North Atlantic Current". Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020 - 16-21 February 2020 in San Diego, Calif. American Geophysical Union. 18 February 2020. Retrieved 14 September 2020.
- ↑ Volkov, Denis. (2005). Interannual Variability of the Altimetry-Derived Eddy Field and Surface Circulation in the Extratropical North Atlantic Ocean in 1993–2001. Journal of Physical Oceanography. 35. 405-426. 10.1175/JPO2683.1.
- ↑ Bingham, R J; et al. (2010). "Using GOCE to estimate the mean North Atlantic circulation (Invited)". Abstract presented at 2010 Fall Meeting, AGU, San Francisco, Calif., 13-17 Dec. American Geophysical Union. Retrieved 2010-12-22.
- ↑ Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News (21 Dec 2010). "Goce gravity mission traces ocean circulation". BBC News website, Science & Environment. BBC News. Retrieved 21 Dec 2010.
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