Observational Evidence of Alternating Zonal Jets in the Ocean

Details Observational Evidence of Alternating Zonal Jets in the Ocean Observational Evidence of Alternating Zonal Jets in the Ocean

May 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agusmos11a..13m&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2005, abstract #OS11A-13

Mathematics

Logic

4520 Eddies And Mesoscale Processes, 4528 Fronts And Jets, 4532 General Circulation, 4556 Sea Level Variations, 4568 Turbulence, Diffusion, And Mixing Processes

Scientific paper

Two-dimensional turbulence freely evolving on a rotating sphere is predicted by theory to form zonally oriented alternating jets. Such jets are well seen in atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn as bands of clouds, but it is not certain whether they exist in the Earth's ocean with its complex forcing, boundary conditions and baroclinicity. Interpretation of quasi-periodic in latitude alternating currents on many meridional sections is complicated because of the lack of information about zonal extent of the structures. It is only recently that the newest global eddy-resolving numerical models of ocean circulation provided multi-year outputs suitable for the study of long-term evolution of realistic eddy field. Their data do reveal persistent, slowly varying zonal jets in the deep ocean. In this study, we succeeded to extract the signal of time-varying alternating zonal jets from maps of the Aviso sea level anomaly based on satellite altimeter data. The jets are ubiquitous and demonstrate complex spatial distribution of their characteristics and interesting tendencies of their temporal evolution. Data of the OGCM for the Earth Simulator (OFES) forced for 50 years by climatological fluxes are used to prove that jets' velocity is highly coherent in vertical and that the signal extracted from the satellite altimeter data is directly relevant to the deep jets. Results of preliminary comparison with the theory are discussed.

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