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Isoneutral eddy stirring across continental margins
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Slope-Aware Eddy Parameterizations
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Baroclinic Turbulence over Continental Slopes
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Coherent Lagrangian Vortices (archived)
Untitled Document
My early studies focused on the role of coherent Lagrangian vorticies (CLVs) in transporting the Agulhas leakage across the South Atlantic Basin. Differing from more diffusive "eddy fluxes" in a GFD sense, coherent transport of the Agulhas leakage is expected to experience shorter time scales owing to the self-advection and material robustness of CLVs.
Exchanges between coastal and open-ocean environments profoundly modulate the marine system and the glacier retreat rate
in a changing climate. Such exchanges are largely attributable to mesoscale eddy stirring along neutral density surfaces.
This project aims to quantify and parameterize the isoneutral eddy stirring across continental margins via a hierarchy of ocean models.
This work is supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Grant Number ECS26307720.
Numerical ocean models are increasingly capable of resolving mesoscale eddies with horizontal grid spacing as fine as 1/12 degree.
However, a horizontal resolution of at least 1/48 degree is required to resolve the mesoscale across continental slopes. Existing
eddy parameterizations were mainly developed based on open-ocean eddy properties and thus must be adapted to sloping bathymetry.
This ongoing project aims to devise a set of "slope-aware" eddy parameterization schemes, and thus to better represent the cross-slope
transfer of heat, carbon, and other climatologically significant tracers in global ocean models. This work is
supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Grant Number GRF16305321.
Continental slopes constitute much of the steepest part of the ocean bed. Owing to the strong topographic PV
gradient, large-scale flows over continental slopes tend to follow the isobaths. However, these flows are also
associated with sharp cross-stream velocity shear and buoyancy gradient, favoring barotropic and baroclinic instabilities
from which mesoscale eddies develop.
This study focuses on the interaction between mesoscale eddies and large-scale flows over continental slopes and the
cross-slope buoyancy/tracer transfer driven by mesoscale eddies. A link to the repository of numerical simulation data generated
via this study can be found
here
.