Labrador Sea Boundary Currents and the Fate of the Irminger Sea Water

Cuny, Jérôme; Rhines, Peter B.; Niiler, Pearn P.; Bacon, Sheldon

doi:10.1175/1520-0485(2002)032<0627:lsbcat>2.0.co;2

Cited by 202 publications

(248 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The WGC bifurcates here, with the nearshore portion of the current system remaining attached to the coast and the offshore portion following the 3000-m isobath around the northern boundary of the Labrador Sea (Cuny et al 2002). In the present study, eddies formed in the gap are advected downstream by the mean flow and accumulate at the downstream end of the gap because they are unable to propagate onto the gentle bathymetry.…”

Section: Comparison With Oceanic Observationsmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…This region of variability is evident in satellite altimetry records (Prater 2002;Lilly et al 2003), and in the tracks of surface drifters (Cuny et al 2002) and RAFOS floats (Prater 2002). Eddies present in this region are called "Irminger rings" and are filled at middepth with warm, salty Gulf Streamorigin water; they often contain cold, fresh Arcticorigin water near the surface (Prater 2002;Lilly et al 2003), as well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Laboratory Experiments on Eddy Generation by a Buoyant Coastal Current Flowing over Variable Bathymetry*

Wolfe

Cenedese

2006

Journal of Physical Oceanography

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Irminger rings are warm-core eddies formed off the west coast of Greenland. Recent studies suggest that these eddies, which are implicated in the rapid springtime restratification of the Labrador Sea, are formed by an internal instability of the West Greenland Current (WGC), triggered by bathymetric variations. This study seeks to explore the effect of the magnitude and downstream length scale of bathymetric variations on the stability of a simple model of the WGC in a series of laboratory experiments in which a buoyant coastal current was allowed to flow over bathymetry consisting of piecewise constant slopes of varying magnitude. The currents did not form eddies over gently sloping bathymetry and only formed eddies over steep bathymetry if the current width exceeded the width of the sloping bathymetry. Eddying currents were immediately stabilized if they flowed onto gently sloping topography. Bathymetric variations that persisted only a short distance downstream perturbed the flow locally but did not lead to eddy formation. Eddies formed only once the downstream length of the bathymetric variations exceeded a critical scale of about 8 Rossby radii. These results are consistent with the observed behavior of the WGC, which begins to form Irminger rings after entering a region where the continental slope abruptly steepens and becomes narrower than the WGC itself in a region spanning about 20-80 Rossby radii of downstream distance.

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Section: Comparison With Oceanic Observationsmentioning

confidence: 67%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laboratory Experiments on Eddy Generation by a Buoyant Coastal Current Flowing over Variable Bathymetry*

Wolfe

Cenedese

2006

Journal of Physical Oceanography

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“…For larger regions, a decrease in the ratio towards the equatorial region and its strong increase towards the polar waters should be accounted for. In particular, in polar regions the currents are nearly barotropic and the transition occur in a jump when crossing the subpolar and polar fronts (Cuny et al, 2002;Losch and Schröter, 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temperature–salinity distribution in the northeastern Atlantic from ship and Argo vertical casts

et al. 2015

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Abstract. The present study defines new interpolation functions for hydrological data. These functions are applied to generate climatological maps of temperature-salinity distribution with a 25 m depth interval and a 30 km space interval (MEDTRANS data set). The data undergo rigorous initial data quality control, having passed several filtering procedures. The gridding is done on neutral density surfaces, which allows better representation of thermohaline fronts for the same gridding radius. The multi-pass Barnes optimum interpolation procedure with spatially variable size of the gridding window is used. The shape of the window accounts for the dominant along-isobath direction of water mass transport over steeply sloping topography. A local ratio of topographic to planetary β-effects is used to define the shape of the window as a function of the relative importance of the topographic influence. The N /f ratio is applied to account for the baroclinic compensation decay of the topographic influence on water mass transport with the distance from the bottom. The gridded fields are available at the website of the Centre of Oceanography of the University of Lisbon (http://co.fc.ul.pt/en/data).The MEDTRANS climatology gives more details of the distribution of water characteristics in the subtropical northeastern Atlantic than other alternative climatologies and is able to reproduce a number of dynamic features described in the literature: the acceleration in the meanders of the Azores current; the cyclonic gyre in the Gulf of Cadiz; and the splitting and separation of the Mediterranean Water (MW) outflow in two veins near the Gorringe and Galicia banks. Seasonal climatologies, computed for the warm (May-October) and cold (November-April) seasons, reveal stronger zonal extension of the upper ocean patterns during the warm season, as compared to the cold one.

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“…This hypothesis is supported by observations of the flow at the mouth of Hudson Strait (Le Blond et al 1981) and by the observation that properties over the Labrador Shelf differ from those over the Baffin Bay shelf south of Davis St. (Lazier 1982;Sutcliffe et al 1983;Drinkwater and Jones, 1987) which question the existence of a dominant direct route of the surface waters from Davis Strait to the Labrador shelf. (An alternative source of waters for the inflow into Hudson Strait could be the West Greenland recirculation (Loder et al 1998;Cuny et al 2002), however, this appears to follow the 3000 isobath around the Labrador Sea and hence to transit far offshore of the mouth of Hudson Strait. Indeed, none of the drifters shown in Cuny et al (2002) head into Hudson Strait.)…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%