The two-branched inflow of warm and saline Atlantic Water to the Arctic is the major contributor of oceanic heat to the Arctic climate system. However, while the Atlantic Water entering the Arctic through the Fram Strait retains a large part of its heat as it flows along the Arctic continental slope, the branch flowing through the shallow Barents Sea releases a substantial amount of heat to the...

The surface circulation off the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula is strongly influenced by the atmospheric pressure distribution in the North Atlantic. During the winter season, the combination of the onshore Ekman transport and the geostrophic adjustment of the large-scale oceanic zonal flow causes the appearance of a seasonal poleward along-shore flow named Navidad current. This surface...

In turbulent rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection Ekman vortices extract hot or cold fluid from thermal boundary layers near the bottom or top plate and enhance the Nusselt number. It is known from experiments and direct numerical simulation on cylindrical samples with aspect ratio Γ ≡ D/L (D is the diameter and L the height) that the enhancement occurs only above a bifurcation point at a critic...

A 3-km resolution regional ocean model is used to investigate the role of wind-driven coastal circulation and mesoscale variability on inter-annual transport success in southern Benguela between Cape Point (34°S) St Helena Bay (32°S) from 1992 2011. Lagrangian particles are released within top 100 m water column along an across-shore transect off Point. Transport given by ratio number that reac...

This paper studies the interaction of an Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC)–like wind-driven channel flow with a continental slope and a flat-bottomed bay-shaped shelf near the channel’s southern boundary. Interaction between the model ACC and the topography in the second layer induces local changes of the potential vorticity (PV) flux, which further causes the formation of a first-layer PV fr...

[1] The Princeton Ocean Model is used to study the circulation in the South China Sea (SCS) and its seasonal transition. Kuroshio enters (leaves) the SCS through the southern (northern) portion of the Luzon Strait. The annually averaged net volume flux through the Luzon Strait is 2 Sv into the SCS with seasonal reversals. The inflow season is from May to January with the maximum intrusion of Ku...

Numerical experiments are described that pertain to the climate of a coupled atmosphereocean-ice system in the absence of land, driven by modern-day orbital and CO2 forcing. Millennial timescale simulations yield a mean state in which ice caps reach down to 55 of latitude and both the atmosphere and ocean comprise eastward and westward-flowing zonal jets, whose structure is set by their respect...

We present an observation-based heat budget analysis for seasonal and interannual variations of ocean heat content (H) in the mixed layer (Hmld) and full-depth ocean (Htot). Surface heat flux and ocean heat content estimates are combined using a novel Kalman smoother-based method. Regional contributions from ocean heat transport convergences are inferred as a residual and the dominant drivers o...

We revisit experimental studies performed by Ekman on dead-water (Ekman, 1904) using modern techniques in order to present new insights on this peculiar phenomenon. We extend its description to more general situations such as a three-layer fluid or a linearly stratified fluid in presence of a pycnocline, showing the robustness of dead-water phenomenon. We observe large amplitude nonlinear inter...