Event

Seminar: Dr. Andrew Wilmot

Friday, May 27, 2016 11:00to12:00
Burnside Hall Room 934, 805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 0B9, CA

Please join us as we welcome Dr. Andrew Wilmot from the School of Marine Science and Technology at Newcastle University for his seminar titled "Source-sink and wind stress curl driven planetary flows in a polar basin". Coffee will be served.

Abstract

Analytical process models are developed to study linear, steady-state, source-sink and wind stress curl driven barotropic planetary flows in a circular polar basin on the sphere with two open boundaries and simple shelf topography. The leading order dynamical balance is geostrophic except near the boundary of the basin and the shelf edge, where dissipation in the form of either linear bottom friction or eddy diffusion becomes significant. Full spherical geometry is retained in the derivation of the barotropic vorticity equation. Subsequently, an overlooked approximation in the refereed literature of the sixties is adopted whereby the latitudinal dependence in the coefficients of the vorticity equation are suppressed, hence allowing analytical solutions to be obtained. The approximation is justified a posteriori and the study compares the analytical solutions with numerical solutions obtained from the NEMO Ocean modelling system configured for the same spherical cap domain. The NEMO model is then used to investigate the impact of a shelf and simple representation of the Lomonosov Ridge on the structure of both wind and source—sink driven flows, where analytical solutions cannot be obtained. The study concludes with a discussion about how these experiments shed light on the subtle interplay between the complex Arctic basin topography and the wind and boundary driven sea ice-ocean circulation.

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