Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 119 (2014): 218–227, doi:10.1002/2013JC009393.
Description:
The temperature in the coastal ocean off the northeastern U.S. during the first half of 2012 was anomalously warm, and this resulted in major impacts on the marine ecosystem and commercial fisheries. Understanding the spatiotemporal characteristics of the warming and its underlying dynamical processes is important for improving ecosystem management. Here, we show that the warming in the first half of 2012 was systematic from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras. Moreover, the warm anomalies extended through the water column, and the local temperature change of shelf water in the Middle Atlantic Bight was largely balanced by the atmospheric heat flux. The anomalous atmospheric jet stream position induced smaller heat loss from the ocean and caused a much slower cooling rate in late autumn and early winter of 2011–2012. Strong jet stream intraseasonal oscillations in the first half of 2012 systematically increased the warm anomalies over the continental shelf. Despite the importance of advection in prior northeastern U.S. continental shelf interannual temperature anomalies, our analyses show that much of the 2012 warming event was attributed to local warming from the atmosphere.
Description:
K.C. was supported by the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution Postdoctoral Scholarship, with funding provided
by the Cooperative Institute for North Atlantic Region. G.G.G. was supported
by grant N00014-11-1-0160 from the Office of Naval Research.
S.J.L. was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant
OCE-1154575.
Description:
2014-07-13
Keywords:
2012 warming
;
Warm anomaly
;
Northeastern U.S. Coastal Ocean
;
Jet stream
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
Permalink
