Can eddies make ocean deserts bloom?

Visualization and Analysis of Eddies in a Global Ocean Simulation

We present analysis and visualization of flow data from a high-resolution simulation of the dynamical behavior of the global ocean. Of particular scientific interest are coherent vortical features called mesoscale eddies. We first extract high-vorticity features using a metric from the oceanography community called the Okubo-Weiss parameter. We then use a new circularity criterion to differenti...

The Southern Ocean Overturning: Parameterized versus Permitted Eddies

Four versions of the same global climate model, with horizontal resolution ranging from 1.88 3 3.68 to 0.28 3 0.48, are employed to evaluate the resolution dependence of the Southern Ocean meridional overturning circulation. At coarse resolutions North Atlantic Deep Water tends to upwell diabatically at low latitudes, so that the Southern Ocean is weakly coupled with the rest of the ocean. As r...

Variability, instabilities and eddies in a Snowball ocean

An ocean covered by (∼1 km) thick ice, motivated by Snowball Earth conditions and driven by a very weak geothermal heat flux, is shown to be characterized by an energetic turbulent eddy field, zonal jets that propagate towards the equator and a strongly variable meridional overturning circulation (MOC). There are two main opposite-sign zonal jets around the equator that are not eddy driven, tog...

Extracting and Visualizing Ocean Eddies in Time–Varying Flow Fields

Covariate-based stochastic parameterization of baroclinic ocean eddies

Abstract: In this study we investigate a covariate-based stochastic approach to parameterize unresolved turbulent processes within a standard model of the idealised, wind-driven ocean circulation. We focus on vertical instead of horizontal coarse-graining, such that we avoid the subtle difficulties of horizontal coarsegraining. The corresponding eddy forcing is uniquely defined and has a clear ...