A hierarchy of thermohaline circulation models. Final report

摘要

The objectives of this effort were: (1) to understand the variability caused by the competitive roles of salt and heat in the ocean circulation; (2) to understand the effect of differential advection of active tracers, such as temperature, salinity and angular momentum; and (3) to improve the parametrization of convection in models of the ocean circulation. One result of the project is the discovery that the characteristics of the quasi-periodic centennial and millennial oscillations found in OGCM`s, associated with alternating suppression and activation of high latitude convection, are extremely sensitive to the salinity flux and specific choice of convective adjustment scheme. In particular, the period of the oscillation depends crucially on the salinity fluxes (whether deterministic or with a stochastic component) and can be arbitrarily long. This result has clarified that these long-period oscillations (termed flushes) are not the result of the excitation of an intrinsic linear eigenmode of the system, but rather are relaxation-oscillations towards one of the several equilibria available to the system. This implies that it is the amplitude, rather than the period, of the oscillation which is almost independent of the salinity flux.