6 research outputs found
Discrete eddies in the northern North Atlantic as observed by looping RAFOS floats
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2004. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 52 (2005): 627-650, doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2004.12.011.RAFOS float trajectories near the 27.5 density level were analyzed to investigate discrete
eddies in the northern North Atlantic with the objective of determining their geographical
distribution and characteristics. Floats that made two or more consecutive loops in the
same direction (loopers) were considered to have been in an eddy. Overall 15% (24 float
years) of the float data were in loopers. One hundred and eight loopers were identified in
96 different eddies. Roughly half of the eddies were cyclonic (49%) and half were
anticyclonic (51%), although the percentages varied in different regions. A few eddies
were quasi-stationary for long times, one for over a year in the Iceland Basin, and many
others clearly translated, often in the direction of the general circulation as observed by
non-looping floats. Several floats were trapped in eddies in the vicinity of the North
Atlantic Current just upstream (west) of the Charlie Gibbs (52ÂșN) and Faraday (50ÂșN)
Fracture Zones, which seem to be preferred routes for flow crossing the mid-Atlantic
ridge. Five floats looped in four anticyclones which translated southwestward away from
the eastern boundary near the Goban Spur (47ÂșN-50ÂșN). These could have been weak
meddies forming from remnants of warm salty Mediterranean Water advected northward
along the eastern boundary.Funds for
this research were provided by National Science Foundation grants OCE-9531877 to
WHOI and OCE-9906775 to URI. This work was also supported by a grant from the
WHOI Associates
Analysis of deepâdrogued satelliteâtracked drifter measurements in the northeast pacific
Optimum fields and bounds on heat transport for nonlinear convection in rapidly rotating fluid layer
By means of the Howard-Busse method of the optimum theory of turbulence
we investigate numerically the effect of strong rotation on the upper bound on the
convective heat transport in a horizontal fluid layer of infinite Prandtl
number Pr. We discuss the case of fields
with one wave number for regions of Rayleigh and Taylor numbers R and Ta
where no analytical asymptotic bounds on the Nusselt number Nu
can be derived by the Howard-Busse method. Nevertheless we observe that
when R > 108 and Ta is large enough the wave number of
the optimum fields comes close to the analytical asymptotic
result α1 = (R/5)1/4. We detect formation of a nonlinear structure
similar to the nonlinear vortex discussed by Bassom and Chang [Geophys. Astrophys.
Fluid Dyn. 76, 223 (1994)].
In addition we obtain evidence for a reshaping of the
horizontal structure of the optimum fields for large values of Rayleigh
and Taylor numbers