Abstract
The variability present in a 1/6th degree Atlantic ocean simulation forced by analysed wind stress and heat flux over a 20-year period is investigated by means of heat transport diagnostics. A section is defined which follows the Gulf Stream and its seaward extension, and transport of heat across this section is analysed to reveal the physical mechanisms responsible for ‘intergyre’ heat exchanges on a variety of time scales. Heat transport across another section that crosses the Gulf Stream is also diagnosed to reveal the temporal behaviour of the ‘gyre’ circulation. The Ekman response to wind stress variations accounts for the annual cycle and much of the interannual variability in both measures. For the intergyre heat transports, cancellation by transient-mean flow terms leads to a very weak annual cycle. Transient eddies account for approximately half the total intergyre transport of 0.7 Petawatts. They also account for a significant fraction of the interannual variability, but separate experiments with repeated-annual-cycle forcing indicate that the transient eddy component of the heat transport variability is internally generated. Links between the intergyre transport, the wind-driven gyre circulation, the surface heat budget and the atmospheric ‘North Atlantic Oscillation’ are discussed.
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Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to Arnaud Czaja for help with calculation of spectra and for useful comments. We thank the reviewer for comments that helped us to clarify some of the discussion. This work was funded by a fellowship from the European Union and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Support for computations was provided by the Institut du Développement et des Recources en Information Scientifique (IDRIS). The CLIPPER project was supported by the Institut Nationale des Sciences de l’Univers (INSU), the Institut Francais de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER), the Service Hydrographique et Océanographique de la Marine (SHOM) and the Centre Nationale d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES).
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Hall, N.M.J., Barnier, B., Penduff, T. et al. Interannual variation of Gulf Stream heat transport in a high-resolution model forced by reanalysis data . Climate Dynamics 23, 341–351 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-004-0449-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-004-0449-2