720 research outputs found

    Exchanges between hemispheres and gyres : a direct approach to the mean circulation of the equatorial Pacific

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    Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution September 1993An extensive set of new high-quality hydrographic data is assembled in order to determine the mean circulation in the equatorial Pacific, and thus the pathways for cross-equatorial and cross-gyre exchange. Making up the core of the data set are two onetime transpacific zonal sections nominally at 10°N and 14°S. Supplementing these are repeat surveys of the equatorial currents along the 165°E meridian with direct shear measurements, and repeat surveys of the western boundary current at 8°N including direct velocity measurements. The repeat survey data are crucial for obtaining a good estimate of the mean conditions in the face of strong annual and interannual variability of the near-equatorial flow field. A comparison with historical XBT and hydrographic data shows that the interior thermocline transports in the one-time sections are fortuitously representative of the mean conditions. A detailed study of the water mass distribution along the sections is the basis for choosing reference levels for the thermal wind shear in an initial guess circulation field. Using an inverse model, the initial guess circulation is adjusted such that volume, heat and salt arc conserved in a set of subthermocline layers (δΘ > 26.7). Cross-isopycnal diffusion and advection are explicitly accounted for in the inverse model, and the diapycnal diffusivity is constrained to be positive, though its value is allowed to vary with depth and location. Net mass conservation constraints are applied to the enclosed volumes of the North Pacific and eastern Pacific, and essentially require that the Ekman divergence be equal to the geostrophic convergence. The Ekman fluxes as estimated from wind-stress climatologies are an important element of the mass budget, and yet are subject to large uncertainties. The model is therefore given the freedom to determine the Ekman fluxes within the range of error of the wind-stresses. The circulation of the coldest waters (Θ < 1.2°C) is dominated by the northward flow of Lower Circumpolar Water (LCPW) in a system of narrow western boundary currents. A net transport of 12.1 Sv of LCPW flows across 14°S, 9.6 Sv of which flows into the North Pacific across 10°N. The bulk of the LCPW flux across the equator appears to occur in the denser part of the western boundary current which follows topography directly across the equator. Dissipation in the boundary layer can thus modify the potential vorticity of the fluid and allow it to cross the equator. The circulation of the upper part of the LCPW is dominated by a strong westward jet at the equator which is supplied both by upwelling from below and the recirculation of modified LCPW from the North Pacific. At mid-depth (4.0 > Θ > 1.2°C) high silica and low oxygen concentrations mark the North Pacific Deep Water (NPDW) which is present in both the North and South Pacific Oceans. Across both 10°N and 14°S, a net of 11 Sv of NPDW flows southward, returning the northward mass flux associated with the LCPW. In contrast to the LCPW, narrow western boundary currents are not present in this layer, and it is not clear how the deep water flows across the equator. Strong zonal jets on and about the equator may be important in allowing mass to cross the equator by increasing the time available for the cross-equatorial diffusion of potential vorticity to act on a fluid parcel. At intermediate depths equatorward advection is suggested by the presence of intermediate water salinity minima formed in the subpolar latitudes: Antarctic Intermediate Water dominates the 4 to 8°C classes south of the equator, while North Pacific Intermediate Water occupies this range north of the equator. Determination of the mean circulation of the intermediate waters is, however, confounded by the large eddies that dominate the geostrophic transport stream function along the onetime zonal sections. The equatorial thermocline is occupied by waters of subtropical origin: the shallow salinity minimum waters and saline Central Water from both the North and South Pacific Ocean. The equator marks the location of a front between northern and southern subtropical gyre waters, except in the lower thermocline where water from the South Pacific subtropical gyre penetrates to about 4°N to feed the Northern Subsurface Countercurrent at 165°E. All of the equatorward flowing thermocline waters are entrained in the eastward equatorial currents which in turn feed the upwelling system in the eastern Pacific. The upwelled waters largely supply the South Equatorial Current in the eastern Pacific, accounting for its large transport compared to that predicted by Sverdrup dynamics. Northward flow across the equator of the upwelled waters in the thermocline or surface layer in the western Pacific is necessary to supply the Ekman flux into the North Pacific. The analysis indicates that the Pacific Ocean does not convert a large amount of abyssal water to thermocline water, as required by several theories of the global thermohaline circulation. In contrast to the Atlantic Ocean, the thermocline circulation in the Pacific appears decoupled from the abyssal overturning, with little upwelling of abyssal waters occurring in either the North Pacific or the equatorial Pacific. The leakage of Pacific water into the Indian Ocean is deduced to be essentially zero, though an error analysis allows a range of 0-8 x 106m3s-1.I was supported by the 1986 Caltex Graduate Women Scholarship, and a NASA Scholarship in Global Change Research

    Anthropogenic aerosols, greenhouse gases, and the uptake, transport, and storage of excess heat in the climate system

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    Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters, 46(9), (2019):4894-4903, doi:10.1029/2019GL082015.The largest contributor to the planetary energy imbalance is well‐mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs), which are partially offset by poorly mixed (and thus northern midlatitude dominated) anthropogenic aerosols (AAs). To isolate the effects of GHGs and AAs, we analyze data from the CMIP5 historical (i.e., all natural and anthropogenic forcing) and single forcing (GHG‐only and AA‐only) experiments. Over the duration of the historical experiment (1861–2005) excess heat uptake at the top of the atmosphere and ocean surface occurs almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, with AAs canceling the influence of GHGs in the Northern Hemisphere. This interhemispheric asymmetry in surface heat uptake is eliminated by a northward oceanic transport of excess heat, as there is little hemispheric difference in historical ocean heat storage after accounting for ocean volume. Data from the 1pctCO2 and RCP 8.5 experiments suggests that the future storage of excess heat will be skewed toward the Northern Hemisphere oceans.We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. CMIP data can be accessed at the ESGF website (https://esgfnode.llnl.gov/projects/esgfllnl/). For CMIP the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. We also thank Paola Petrelli from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, for her assistance with downloading/managing the CMIP5 data archive at the National Computational Infrastructure

    Rapid restratification of the ocean surface boundary layer during the suppressed phase of the MJO in austral spring

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    © The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Hsu, J.-Y., Feng, M., & Wijffels, S. Rapid restratification of the ocean surface boundary layer during the suppressed phase of the MJO in austral spring. Environmental Research Letters, 17(2), (2022): 024031, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4f11.Rapid restratification of the ocean surface boundary layer in the Indonesian-Australian Basin was captured in austral spring 2018, under the conditions of low wind speed and clear sky during the suppressed phase of Madden–Julian Oscillations (MJOs). Despite sunny days, strong diurnal variations of sea surface temperature (SST) were not observed until the wind speed became extremely low, because the decreasing wind speed modulated the latent heat flux. Combined with the horizontal advection of ocean current, the reduced upward heat loss inhibited the nighttime convective mixing and facilitated the restratification of the subsurface ocean layers. The surface mixed layer was thus shoaled up to 40 m in two days. The restratified upper ocean then sustained high SSTs by trapping heat near the sea surface until the onset of the MJO convection. This restratification process might be initialized under the atmospheric downwelling conditions during the suppressed phase of MJOs. The resulted high SSTs may affect the development and trajectories of MJOs, by enhancing air-sea heat and moisture fluxes as the winds pick up. Simulating this detailed interaction between the near-surface ocean and atmospheric features of MJOs remains a challenge, but with sufficient vertical resolution and realistic initial conditions, several features of the observations can be well captured.This work is funded by the project of 'Coupled warm pool dynamics in the Indo-Pacific' under the CSHOR. CSHOR is a joint initiative between the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (QNLM), CSIRO, University of New South Wales and University of Tasmania

    Two distinct modes of climate responses to the anthropogenic aerosol forcing changes

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    Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2022. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Climate 35(11), (2022): 3445-3457, https://doi.org/10.1175/jcli-d-21-0656.1.Unlike greenhouse gases (GHGs), anthropogenic aerosol (AA) concentrations have increased and then decreased over the past century or so, with the timing of the peak concentration varying in different regions. To date, it has been challenging to separate the climate impact of AAs from that due to GHGs and background internal variability. We use a pattern recognition method, taking advantage of spatiotemporal covariance information, to isolate the forced patterns for the surface ocean and associated atmospheric variables from the all-but-one forcing Community Earth System Model ensembles. We find that the aerosol-forced responses are dominated by two leading modes, with one associated with the historical increase and future decrease of global mean aerosol concentrations (dominated by the Northern Hemisphere sources) and the other due to the transition of the primary sources of AA from the west to the east and also from Northern Hemisphere extratropical regions to tropical regions. In particular, the aerosol transition effect, to some extent compensating the global mean effect, exhibits a zonal asymmetry in the surface temperature and salinity responses. We also show that this transition effect dominates the total AA effect during recent decades, e.g., 1967–2007.All three authors are supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (OCE-2048336). The Community Earth System Model project is supported primarily by the National Science Foundation (https://www.cesm.ucar.edu/projects/community-projects/LENS/data-sets.html and https://www.cesm.ucar.edu/working_groups/CVC/simulations/cesm1-single_forcing_le.html)

    Rapid intensification of an established CHO cell fed-batch process

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    Currently, the mammalian biomanufacturing industry explores process intensification (PI) to meet upcoming demands of biotherapeutics while keeping production flexible but, more importantly, as economic as possible. However, intensified processes often require more development time compared with conventional fed-batches (FBs) preventing their implementation. Hence, rapid and efficient, yet straightforward strategies for PI are needed. In this study we demonstrate such a strategy for the intensification of an N-stage FB by implementing N-1 perfusion cell culture and high inoculum cell densities resulting in a robust intensified FB (iFB). Furthermore, we show successful combination of such an iFB with the addition of productivity enhancers, which has not been reported so far. The conventional CHO cell FB process was step-wise improved and intensified rapidly in multi-parallel small-scale bioreactors using N-1 perfusion. The iFBs were performed in 15 and 250 ml bioreactors and allowed to evaluate the impact on key process indicators (KPI): the space–time yield (STY) was successfully doubled from 0.28 to 0.55 g/L d, while product quality was maintained. This gain was generated by initially increasing the inoculation density, thus shrinking process time, and second supplementation with butyric acid (BA), which reduced cell growth and enhanced cell-specific productivity from ~25 to 37 pg/(cell d). Potential impacts of PI on cell metabolism were evaluated using flux balance analysis. Initial metabolic differences between the standard and intensified process were observed but disappeared quickly. This shows that PI can be achieved rapidly for new as well as existing processes without introducing sustained changes in cellular and metabolic behavior.publishedVersio

    Revisiting the seasonal cycle of the Timor throughflow: impacts of winds, waves and eddies

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    © The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Peña‐Molino, B., Sloyan, B., Nikurashin, M., Richet, O., & Wijffels, S. Revisiting the seasonal cycle of the Timor throughflow: impacts of winds, waves and eddies. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 127, (2022): e2021JC018133, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021jc018133.The tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans are connected via a complex system of currents known as the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF). More than 30% of the variability in the ITF is linked to the seasonal cycle, influenced by the Monsoon winds. Despite previous efforts, a detailed knowledge of the ITF response to the components of the seasonal forcing is still lacking. Here, we describe the seasonal cycle of the ITF based on new observations of velocity and properties in Timor Passage, satellite altimetry and a high-resolution regional model. These new observations reveal a complex mean and seasonally varying flow field. The amplitude of the seasonal cycle in volume transport is approximately 6 Sv. The timing of the seasonal cycle, with semi-annual maxima (minima) in May and December (February and September), is controlled by the flow below 600 m associated with semi-annual Kelvin waves. The transport of thermocline waters (<300 m) is less variable than the deep flow but larger in magnitude. This top layer is modulated remotely by cycles of divergence in the Banda Sea, and locally through Ekman transport, coastal upwelling, and non-linearities of the flow. The latter manifests through the formation of eddies that reduce the throughflow during the Southeast Monsoon, when is expected to be maximum. While the reduction in transport associated with the eddies is small, its impact on heat transport is large. These non-linear dynamics develop over small scales (<10 km), and without high enough resolution, both observations and models will fail to capture them adequately.B. Peña-Molino, B. M. Sloyan, M. Nikurashin, and O. Richet were supported by the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR). CSHOR is a joint research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Ocean Research between QNLM and CSIRO. S. E. Wijffels was supported by the US National Science Foundation Grant No. OCE-1851333

    Voltage analysis after multi-electrode ablation with duty-cycled bipolar and unipolar radiofrequency energy: a case report

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    Pulmonary vein ablation with a single-tip catheter remains long and complex. We describe a typical case of a novel efficient technique with a decapolar ring catheter utilizing alternating unipolar/bipolar radiofrequency energy. Voltage analysis and electrical mapping demonstrate the potential for antrum ablation and pulmonary vein isolation
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