Séminaire
Today we are receiving the visit of Kate Snow and Alice Barthel, who will give us two half-length seminars on deep overflows and jet-topography interactions.
The Southern Ocean is a region of strong eastward jet flows and intense eddy activity. Stirring by mesoscale eddies affects the circulation's dynamics and the meridional transport of tracers such as heat and nutrients across the jets, particularly downstream of large topographic features. Understanding the physical processes underlying these eddy effects is important to predict the Southern Ocean's response to changing forcing and to design physically-based parameterizations of these effects.
I will report on a theoretical study that investigates the effects of jet-topography interactions on jet-eddy dynamics and the mixing of tracers. A quasigeostrophic model of a zonally-evolving unstable jet impinging on topography is used to examine the spatial patterns of EKE and irreversible mixing of a tracer relative to the topography.