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Regionality and seasonality of submesoscale and mesoscale turbulence in the North Pacific Ocean

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Abstract

The kinetic energy (KE) seasonality has been revealed by satellite altimeters in many oceanic regions. Question about the mechanisms that trigger this seasonality is still challenging. We address this question through the comparison of two numerical simulations. The first one, with a 1/10° horizontal grid spacing, 54 vertical levels, represents dynamics of physical scales larger than 50 km. The second one, with a 1/30° grid spacing, 100 vertical levels, takes into account the dynamics of physical scales down to 16 km. Comparison clearly emphasizes in the whole North Pacific Ocean, not only a significant KE increase by a factor up to three, but also the emergence of seasonal variability when the scale range 16–50 km (called submesoscales in this study) is taken into account. But the mechanisms explaining these KE changes display strong regional contrasts. In high KE regions, such the Kuroshio Extension and the western and eastern subtropics, frontal mixed-layer instabilities appear to be the main mechanism for the emergence of submesoscales in winter. Subsequent inverse kinetic energy cascade leads to the KE seasonality of larger scales. In other regions, in particular in subarctic regions, results suggest that the KE seasonality is principally produced by larger-scale instabilities with typical scales of 100 km and not so much by smaller-scale mixed-layer instabilities. Using arguments from geostrophic turbulence, the submesoscale impact in these regions is assumed to strengthen mesoscale eddies that become more coherent and not quickly dissipated, leading to a KE increase.

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Notes

  1. The MLD is defined as the depth at which potential density is different from the sea surface density by 0.03 σ θ .

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Acknowledgements

The simulations were performed on the Earth Simulator under support of JAMSTEC. H.S. is supported by CANON Foundation. P.K. acknowledges the support of IFREMER (through the MOU IFREMER-JAMSTEC), CNRS (France), and the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche [Contract ANR-10-LABX-19-01 (LabexMER)]. B.Q. acknowledges Science Team support from NASA’s SWOT mission NNX16AH66G. We appriciate comments from two reviewers, that significantly improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Application Laboratory, JAMSTEC, 3173-25 Showa-machi, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa, 236-0001, Japan

    Hideharu Sasaki

  2. Laboratoire d’Océanographie Physique et Spatiale, IFREMER-CNRS-UBO-IRD, Plouzane, France

    Patrice Klein

  3. Research and Development Center for Global Change, JAMSTEC, Yokohama, Japan

    Yoshikazu Sasai

  4. Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Bo Qiu

Authors
  1. Hideharu Sasaki
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  2. Patrice Klein
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  3. Yoshikazu Sasai
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  4. Bo Qiu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hideharu Sasaki.

Additional information

Responsible Editor: Ananda Pascual

This article is part of the Topical Collection on the 48th International Liège Colloquium on Ocean Dynamics, Liège, Belgium, 23–27 May 2016

P. Klein is presently a visiting scientist at Caltech/JPL, Pasadena, USA.

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Sasaki, H., Klein, P., Sasai, Y. et al. Regionality and seasonality of submesoscale and mesoscale turbulence in the North Pacific Ocean. Ocean Dynamics 67, 1195–1216 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-017-1083-y

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