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gfdl's home page > gfdl's bibliography > 1993: The Global Carbon Cycle, 303-331
Is the magnitude of the deep outflow from the Atlantic Ocean actually governed by Southern Hemisphere winds?
| Toggweiler, J. R., and B. Samuels, 1993: Is the magnitude of the deep outflow from the Atlantic Ocean actually governed by Southern Hemisphere winds? In The Global Carbon Cycle. Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 303-331. |
| Abstract: The large-scale overturning in the Atlantic Ocean and its export of salty water to the other basins of the ocean is usually thought of as a thermohaline process driven by the formation of dense bottom water in the isolated basins of the North Atlantic. In this paper the output from several different runs of a global ocean GCM is used to show that the inflow of upper kilometer water in the South Atlantic and the outflow of deep water varies in direct proportion to the westerly wind stress in the circumpolar region of the southern hemisphere. According to the results presented here, the production of dense bottom water in the North Atlantic makes it possible for an Atlantic overturning to exist, but southern hemisphere winds appear to determine the magnitude of the inflow and outflow. The connection between southern hemisphere winds and the Atlantic overturning is due to a unique dynamic constraint which operates in the latitude band of Drake Passage. This constraint suggests the possibility of a very simple relationship between the magnitude of the northward wind drift at the latitude of the tip of South America and the magnitude of the inflow and outflow from the Atlantic basin. |