Publication Date:
2022-06-06
Description:
Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2021. 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 Physical Oceanography 51(12),(2021): 3651–3662, https://doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-21-0076.1.
Description:
Ocean striations are composed of alternating quasi-zonal band-like flows; this kind of organized structure of currents can be found in all the world’s oceans and seas. Previous studies have mainly been focused on the mechanisms of their generation and propagation. This study uses the spatial high-pass filtering to obtain the three-dimensional structure of ocean striations in the North Pacific in both the z coordinate and σ coordinate based on 10-yr averaged Simple Ocean Data Assimilation version 3 (SODA3) data. First, we identify an ideal-fluid potential density domain where the striations are undisturbed by the surface forcing and boundary effects. Second, using the isopycnal layer analysis, we show that on isopycnal surfaces the orientations of striations nearly follow the potential vorticity (PV) contours, while in the meridional–vertical plane the central positions of striations are generally aligned with the latitude of zero gradient of the relative PV. Our analysis provides a simple dynamical interpretation and better understanding for the role of ocean striations.
Description:
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42076025, 41676021), the Key Special Project for introduced Talents Team of Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (GML2019ZD0306), the National Basic Research Program (973 Program) of China (2013CB956201). The numerical simulation is supported by the High Performance Computing Division in the South China Sea Institute of Oceanography. The authors thank Tingjin Guan for the help in enhancing drawing quality.
Keywords:
Currents
;
Jets
;
Mesoscale processes
;
Potential vorticity
;
Isopycnal coordinates
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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