29.09.2016: FB1-Seminar

11:00 h, Hörsaal, Düsternbrooker Weg 20

Abstract:

The first study considers scales from a few tens of meters to a few  tens of kilometers and grapples with a fundamental question that concerns energetics of ocean circulation: how does ocean circulation equilibrate in the presence of continuous large-scale forcing and a tendency of geostrophic turbulence to confine energy to large and intermediate scales. In particular, interior submesoscale instabilities are shown to provide an interior energy pathway between the largely-balanced, energetic oceanic mesoscales and smaller
unbalanced scales with attendant interior mixing (J. Fluid Mech. (2014), vol. 756, pp. 965–1006; doi:10.1017/jfm.2014.464).

The second topic considers global warming from an energy balance perspective. The realized surface warming crucially depends on the uptake of heat by the global ocean and the latter is in excess of 90% of the energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere. In this context, the commonly-used upwelling-diffusion energy balance model is shown to be unable to reasonably represent the vertical distribution of ocean heat uptake. Introduction of a simple parameterization of subduction/deepwater-formation is shown to remove this deficiency. Some investigations with a more mechanistic model are also presented.

 

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