Lynne Talley, 2000
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The notes given here are in expanded outline form. The purpose of the notes is mainly to provide many of the figures used in class. The notes are not complete, and are not meant to replace the required text reading. All references are given in the study guide and bibliography .
What forces act on the ocean? (e.g. wind [waves, turbulence, large scale waves, circulation], heating due to the sun and geothermal energy, cooling, evaporation due to sun and wind, precipitation, tidal potential [the moon and sun], earthquakes, gravity)
(zonal = east-west and meridional = north-south).
The areas of the oceans are: Pacific (179 x1e6 km2), Atlantic (106x1e6 km2), Indian (75 x1e6 km2). The order of magnitude of the horizontal length scales that we associate with these oceans are: Pacific (15,000 km), Atlantic (5,000 km), Indian (5,000 km).
The earth's radius is approximately 6371 km. (The earth is actually not a sphere, but this is close enough for us.) The average depth of the ocean is about 4000 m (actually 3795 m). Thus the ocean is a thin skin on the outside of the earth. The average height of land is 245 m. The maximum elevation is about 9,000 m (Mt. Everest) and the maximum ocean depth is about 11,500 m (Mindanao Trench).
We divide the ocean regions into:
Oceans - Atlantic, Pacific, Indian. We often call the
region south of about 40S or 30S the "Southern Ocean".
Mediterranean seas - Mediterranean, Arctic, Gulf of Mexico, Red Sea,
Persian Gulf.
Marginal seas - many. Examples: Pacific (Bering Sea),
Atlantic (Caribbean), Indian (Andaman).
Inland seas - Black, Caspian Seas, Lake Baikal, Great Lakes.
Areas of open oceans are sometimes referred to as "seas", mainly for
historical reasons and geographical convenience. There are
no rules about whether some areas should have names and others
should not. Examples are: Arctic (Greenland, Norwegian,
iceland, Kara, Barents, Chukchi Seas), N. Atlantic (Labrador, Irminger,
Sargasso Seas), Southern Ocean (Weddell, Ross Seas), Indian (Arabian
Sea, Bay of Bengal), South Pacific (Tasman Sea), North Pacific (Gulf of Alaska).
Geostrophic balance: in the ma=F equation, the dominant terms are the Coriolis acceleration and the pressure gradient. The time changes, advection and forcing/dissipation are much smaller. Geostrophic flow in the northern hemisphere is clockwise around high pressures (and counterclockwise around low pressures), and is the opposite in the southern hemisphere. I think of it this way: water is being pushed "down the pressure gradient" (that is, from high pressure to low pressure), and the Coriolis force turns it to the right in the northern hemisphere. A purely geostrophic flow has ONLY the Coriolis part and NONE of the part that goes down the pressure gradient.
Surface current maps from Tomczak and Godfrey or Pickard and Emery showing the large-scale geostrophic flow. Major similarities between the various ocean basins. Note asymmetry of the gyres: strong western boundary currents and weaker flow in the interior; weak and shallow eastern boundary currents.
Subtropical gyres in every ocean basin (high pressure in the middle so flow is clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere)
Subpolar gyres in the two northern hemisphere basins and in the Weddell and Ross Seas (low pressure in the middle)
The geostrophic flow in these gyres consists of narrow, swift western boundary currents and gentler flow in the ocean interior away from the western boundary. The western boundary currents and the ACC extend to the ocean bottom. The wind-driven gyre flow in the interior away from the western boundaries extends to about 2000 m depth.
The gyres have eastern boundary currents that apparently extend to no more than about 500 m depth.
There is also an intense wind-driven circulation towards the east around Antarctica, called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). It extends to the ocean bottom. It consists of a series of fronts, described in the later lecture on the Southern Ocean.
There are major east-west currents at the equator, which reverse direction every few hundred meters from the top of the ocean to the bottom. (See later lecture on equatorial currents for much better description of these reversing jets, whose vertical scale changes with depth.)
Thermohaline circulation: Heating/cooling and to a lesser extent evaporation/precipitation drive global and basin-scale circulations characterized by overturn (sinking of dense water and upwelling). The current driven by this are slower than the wind-driven currents in most places. It is useful to think of this circulation as being imposed separately from the wind-driven circulation, although there are likely some nonlinear interactions. Deep western boundary currents and slow interior deep flow are thermohaline.
Conveyor belt diagram (Broecker, 1991) based on Gordon (1986) for the North Atlantic Deep Water cell gives the sense of the global scale of the overturning, but is completely missing the Antarctic Bottom Water cell, and is likely not to be correct in the locations and implied magnitudes and path of the return flows to the North Atlantic.
Schmitz (1995) diagram: better sense of the complexity of the overturning pathways. Division of the ocean into 4 layers is sensible (upper ocean to pycnocline, intermediate layer, deep water layer, bottom water layer). Note however that this cartoon does not yield the actual flowpaths.