Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
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 June 2012
Description:
Observations from a three-year field program on the inner shelf south of Martha's
Vineyard, MA and a numerical model are used to describe the effect of stratification
on inner shelf circulation, transport, and sediment resuspension height. Thermal
stratification above the bottom mixed layer is shown to cap the height to which sediment
is resuspended. Stratification increases the transport driven by cross-shelf wind
stresses, and this effect is larger in the response to offshore winds than onshore winds.
However, a one-dimensional view of the dynamics is not sufficient to explain the relationship
between circulation and stratification. An idealized, cross-shelf transect in
a numerical model (ROMS) is used to isolate the effects of stratification, wind stress
magnitude, surface heat flux, cross-shelf density gradient, and wind direction on the
inner shelf response to the cross-shelf component of the wind stress. In well mixed
and weakly stratified conditions, the cross-shelf density gradient can be used to predict
the transport efficiency of the cross-shelf wind stress. In stratified conditions,
the presence of an along-shelf wind stress component makes the inner shelf response
to cross-shelf wind stress strongly asymmetric.
Description:
This work was supported through National Science Foundation grant no. OCE-0548961, the WHOI Academic Programs Office, and the WHOI Coastal Ocean Institute.
Keywords:
Ocean-atmosphere interaction
;
Ocean circulation
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Thesis
Format:
application/pdf
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