Séminaire
The ocean transports vast amounts of heat around the planet, helping to regulate regional climate. In this talk I will discuss a framework that relates the ocean's meridional heat transport to the diabatic processes of air-sea heat fluxes and mixing that move heat across temperature classes. Applied to a global ocean model the framework emphasizes the role of upwelling in the eastern tropical Pacific, and the exchange of heat between the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic basins. Turbulent mixing (both explicitly parameterized and numerical mixing) plays a key role by moving heat from the warm, shallow Indo-Pacific circulation to the deeper-reaching Atlantic circulation and to the cold isotherms that outcrop in the North Atlantic. The role of the eastern Pacific cold tongue emphasises the need to better understand the complexity of processes that influence vertical heat exchange there. I will also discuss interactions between tropical instability waves, atmospheric variability and shear-driven turbulent mixing that impact the large-scale circulation in the cold tongue region and its interannual variability.
cdllod@locean-ipsl.upmc.fr