Publication Date:
2022-10-26
Description:
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(5), (2019):2704-2714, doi:10.1029/2019GL081919.
Description:
Seismic images and glider sections of the Gulf Stream front along the U.S. eastern seaboard capture deep, lens‐shaped submesoscale features. These features have radii of 5–20 km, thicknesses of 150–300 m, and are located at depths greater than 500 m. These are typical signatures of anticyclonic submesoscale coherent vortices. A submesoscale‐resolving realistic simulation, which reproduces submesoscale coherent vortices with the same characteristics, is used to analyze their generation mechanism. Submesoscale coherent vortices are primarily generated where the Gulf Stream meets the Charleston Bump, a deep topographic feature, due to the frictional effects and intense mixing in the wake of the topography. These submesoscale coherent vortices can transport waters from the Charleston Bump's thick bottom mixed layer over long distances and spread them within the subtropical gyre. Their net effect on heat and salt distribution remains to be quantified.
Description:
J. G. gratefully acknowledges support from the French government, managed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR), through programs ISblue (ANR‐17‐EURE‐0015) and LabexMER (ANR‐10‐LABX‐19) and from LEFE/IMAGO through the project AO2017‐994457‐RADII. Simulations were performed using HPC resources from GENCI‐TGCC (grant 2017‐A0010107638). Simulations output is available upon request. Seismic data were processed using the Echos software package by Paradigm, Matlab, and Generic Mapping Tools. The Eastern North America Margin Community Seismic Experiment was funded by the National Science Foundation under grant OCE‐1347498 and UNOLS; cruise data are freely available via the Marine Geoscience Data System Academic Seismic Portal at Lamont‐Doherty Earth Observatory (http://www.marine-geo.org/portals/seismic/). Spray glider observations in the Gulf Stream are available from http://spraydata.ucsd.edu and should be cited using the following DOI (10.21238/S8SPRAY2675; Todd & Owens, 2016). Spray glider operations were funded by the National Science Foundation (OCE‐1633911) and the Office of Naval Research (N000141713040).
Description:
2019-08-27
Keywords:
Submesoscale coherent vortices
;
Glider
;
Seismic observations
;
Gulf Stream
;
Topographic interactions
;
Charleston Bump
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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