| Air-Sea
Fluxes and Ocean Heat Content in the Western Boundary Current - by
Kathryn Kelly
Kathie's current research interests include understanding
atmosphere-ocean coupling in the mid-latitudes, the upper ocean heat
budget and the effect of the ocean on air-sea heat fluxes and on extra-tropical
storms, and decadal variability in all of these areas. Satellite observations,
with large-scale coverage and high resolution, allow a close look at
the relatively narrow current systems, as well as revealing a wealth
of detail about coupling processes. This detailed view is combined with
the coarser view from longer data records and with numerical circulation
models to understand the processes responsible for observed phenomena
and to extrapolate observed interannual-to-decadal variations to the
decadal time scales.
Altimetric Derived Estimates of the North Atlantic
Upper Ocean Heat Budget
The goals of this work are to compute and interpret the
upper ocean heat budget in terms of ocean circulation changes and ocean
heat storage, and to understand both fluxes of heat across the current
systems and fluxes between the atmosphere and the ocean. Comparisons
are made between heat budgets derived from a simple model using the
altimeter data for geostrophic velocities and from a high-resolution
ocean general circulation model
The Impact of Ocean Current Systems on the Atmosphere.
This is a regional study of the impact of midlatitude
western boundary currents on the atmosphere, specifically on the evolution
of storms and their tracks over the Gulf Stream. Analyses and statistics
from scatterometer wind fields, as well as fields from weather prediction
products, will be compared with ocean parameters: sea surface temperature
(SST), heat content, and air-sea fluxes to determine significant connections,
with particular emphasis on the prediction of storm statistics. Experiments
using an atmospheric GCM will be used to understand the processes responsible
for observed atmosphere-ocean interactions.
CLIvar Mode Water Dynamic Experiment.
CLIMODE is a multi-institutional field experiment to study
the dynamics of the subtropical mode water of the North Atlantic. This
unstratified water mass, formed adjacent to the Gulf Stream in a region
of substantial ocean heat loss, has a large capacity for heat storage.
CLIMODE examines key processes of mode water formation that are poorly
understood and poorly represented in ocean climate models: convection,
eddy and mixing processes, the associated air-sea interaction, and the
exchange of fluid between the mixed layer and the upper ocean.
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The Ocean’s Northern hemisphere
Annular Mode. (a) The first EOFs of heat content (colors) and
sea level pressure (contours) and (b) the time series of SLP
(Arctic Oscillation Index, blue) and heat content (red). Heat
content and SLP modes are negatively correlated with the AO leading
heat content anomalies by 13 months. |
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