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Turbulent mixing above the Atlantic Water around the Chukchi Borderland in 2014

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Abstract

This study presents an analysis of the CTD data and the turbulent microstructure data collected in 2014, the turbulent mixing environment above the Atlantic Water (AW) around the Chukchi Borderland region is studied. Surface wind becomes more efficient in driving the upper ocean movement along with the rapid decline of sea ice, thus results in a more restless interior of the Arctic Ocean. The turbulent dissipation rate is in the range of 4.60×10–10–3.31×10–9 W/kg with a mean value of 1.33×10–9 W/kg, while the diapycnal diffusivity is in the range of 1.45×10–6–1.46×10–5 m2/s with a mean value of 4.84×10–6 m2/s in 200–300 m (above the AW). After investigating on the traditional factors (i.e., wind, topography and tides) that may contribute to the turbulent dissipation rate, the results show that the tidal kinetic energy plays a dominating role in the vertical mixing above the AW. Besides, the swing of the Beaufort Gyre (BG) has an impact on the vertical shear of the geostrophic current and may contribute to the regional difference of turbulent mixing. The parameterized method for the double-diffusive convection flux above the AW is validated by the direct turbulent microstructure results.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the research groups of the 6th Chinese Arctic research expedition for assistant of collecting the CTD and turbulent microstructure data. Parts of the hydrographic data are from the Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project (BGEP) at http://www.whoi.edu/beaufortgyre/. The ECMWF surface wind data are available at https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets. The sea ice velocity is distributed by NSIDC (https://nsidc. org/data/nsidc-0116). The sea ice concentration data is downloaded from https://seaice.uni-bremen.de/sea-ice-concentration/# Data_Archive. The data of the Arctic Ocean Dynamicsbased Tide Model is from http://polaris.esr.org/ptm_index.html.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100, China

    Wenli Zhong, Guijun Guo, Jinping Zhao, Tao Li, Xiaoyu Wang & Longjiang Mu

  2. Center for Ocean and Climate Research, The First Institute of Oceanography, Qingdao, 266061, China

    Guijun Guo

  3. Key Laboratory of Research on Marine Hazards Forecasting, National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center, State Oceanic Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Longjiang Mu

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  1. Wenli Zhong
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  2. Guijun Guo
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  4. Tao Li
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  5. Xiaoyu Wang
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  6. Longjiang Mu
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Correspondence to Wenli Zhong.

Additional information

Foundation item: The Key Project of Chinese Natural Science Foundation under contract No. 41330960; the National Basic Research Program (973 Program) of China under contract No. 2015CB953902; the Ph D Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China under contract No. 20130132110021; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 41706211.

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Zhong, W., Guo, G., Zhao, J. et al. Turbulent mixing above the Atlantic Water around the Chukchi Borderland in 2014. Acta Oceanol. Sin. 37, 31–41 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-018-1198-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-018-1198-0

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