The ocean circulation is driven by a combination of winds and surface buoyancy fluxes. We run a number of experiments with varied surface forcings and look at the spatial variations in ocean circulation on short and long time-scales.
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Increasing vertical diffusivity in no-stress runs #23
TS98 studied the ocean in the limit of no vertical mixing in the presence of buoyancy and winds. Their results seem to imply that increasing the vertical diffusivity in the ocean leads to an increase in the upper cell of overturning, and also in increasing the Drake Passage transport, while keeping the buoyancy and wind forcing the same.
We can run an experiment with no winds, buoyancy forcing and enhanced vertical diffusivity. We could potentially fine tune the vertical diffusivity to get a similar overturning and DP response as the control run. I think that by increasing the vertical diffusivity, we are, in a way, restoring/modifying the stratification to look more like the control run.
Here is a plot of the KE, APE and ACC strength for different vertical diffusivities. G -> Control run, N -> No-stress run. The number after that implies the vertical diffusivity in cm^2/s-1 (another figure attached for model description). As we can see, the no-stress case with enhanced vertical diffusivity looks a lot like the control case with standard vertical diffusivity. From the figure, it looks like a constant vertical diffusivity of 0.7 cm^2/s-1 would lead to a similar ACC and APE, but reduced KE.
TS98 studied the ocean in the limit of no vertical mixing in the presence of buoyancy and winds. Their results seem to imply that increasing the vertical diffusivity in the ocean leads to an increase in the upper cell of overturning, and also in increasing the Drake Passage transport, while keeping the buoyancy and wind forcing the same.
We can run an experiment with no winds, buoyancy forcing and enhanced vertical diffusivity. We could potentially fine tune the vertical diffusivity to get a similar overturning and DP response as the control run. I think that by increasing the vertical diffusivity, we are, in a way, restoring/modifying the stratification to look more like the control run.
Here is a plot of the KE, APE and ACC strength for different vertical diffusivities. G -> Control run, N -> No-stress run. The number after that implies the vertical diffusivity in cm^2/s-1 (another figure attached for model description). As we can see, the no-stress case with enhanced vertical diffusivity looks a lot like the control case with standard vertical diffusivity. From the figure, it looks like a constant vertical diffusivity of 0.7 cm^2/s-1 would lead to a similar ACC and APE, but reduced KE.