Pathways into the Pacific Equatorial Undercurrent: A Trajectory Analysis

A Numerical Simulation of the Mean Water Pathways in the Subtropical and Tropical Pacific Ocean

A reduced-gravity, primitive-equation, upper-ocean general circulation model is used to study the mean water pathways in the North Pacific subtropical and tropical ocean. The model features an explicit physical representation of the surface mixed layer, realistic basin geometry, observed wind and heat flux forcing, and a horizontal grid-stretching technique and a vertical sigma coordinate to ob...

From the western boundary currents to the Pacific Equatorial Undercurrent: Modeled pathways and water mass evolutions

Geologic consequences of globe-encircling equatorial currents

Many black shales, phosphorites, and cherts that formed at low paleolatitudes on the North American continent during the late Paleozoic were a direct consequence of equatorial upwelling and an equatorial undercurrent in an ocean that spanned much of the globe. In equatorial parts of modern oceans, wind stress divergence leads to high surface productivity. Sinking organic matter is remineralized...

The circulation of the eastern tropical Pacific: A review

During the 1950s and 1960s, an extensive field study and interpretive effort was made by researchers, primarily at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to sample and understand the physical oceanography of the eastern tropical Pacific. That work was inspired by the valuable fisheries of the region, the recent discovery of the equatorial undercurrent, and the growing realization of the impor...

The Asymmetric Nature of the Equatorial Undercurrent in the Pacific and Atlantic*

The structure of the Equatorial Undercurrent in a two-hemisphere ocean is studied, using a simple ideal-fluid model in which both potential vorticity and the Bernoulli function are conserved along streamlines. For the case of a symmetric forcing, the solution is reduced to the case discussed in previous studies. For the case of asymmetric forcing, the western boundary current from the hemispher...