Stationary Rossby-waves in a two-layer model produced by a submarine ridge

Characteristics of stationary Rossby-waves are investigated by use of equations expressing conservation of potential vorticity for a quasi-geostrophic two-layer flow of an incompressible inviscid fluid on a beta-plane. A two-dimensional problem is discussed; the basic flow is directing eastward without horizontal shear, and the stationary Rossby-waves are produced by a two-dimensional bump extending in the north-south direction which is located on a sloping bottom with a constant north-south gradient.When the slope is steep, stream-lines are scarcely displaced being influenced by the bump. When the bottom has no north-south inclination, however, there is a case where group velocity of Rossby-waves produced by the bump directs westward and the stream-lines meander sinusoidally at the west of the bump. This phenomenon is called upstream influence. These two special cases have a possibility to explain two different mean paths for the Kuroshio namely, the path along the continental slope and the path with a stationary meander at the west of the Izu-Ogasawara Ridge.     

New approaches for archaeal genome-guided cultivation

Archaea, one of the three domains of life along with Bacteria and Eukarya, contains ancient life forms such as methanogen that are observed today on Earth, and one lineage Asgard archaea is also considered the closest ancestor of Eukarya.Recently, with the development of interdisciplinary studies from Earth and Life sciences, archaeal organisms are considered to play pivotal roles in geochemical cycling in nature. However, our understanding of the attributes, origin and evolution, geochemical and ecological functions of Archaea is hampered by the scarcity of archaeal isolates, which has represented a challenge to researchers for the last 40 years. Cultivation-independent sequencing and phylogenomic analyses have demonstrated a considerable diversity of Archaea with more than 20 novel phyla. However, only four archaeal phyla have cultured representatives, leaving large gaps in our knowledge of the metabolic capabilities and ecological functions of the majority of archaeal strains identified exclusively by DNA sequencing. In this review, we summarize the discovery and development of archaeal research, highlight the knowledge gap between uncultured and cultured archaeal microbes, and call on the importance of devoting greater research efforts to archaeal cultivation. Finally, we outlined new ideas and strategic approaches, namely,(1)genome-based methods,(2) microbial network information-based methods,(3) genome-scale model-guided methods, and(4)machine learning methods, to enable the cultivation of uncultivated archaeal microbes using accumulated high-throughput sequencing data.     

Influence of Current Width Variation on the Annual Mean Transport of the East Sakhalin Current: A Simple Model

Recent observations suggest that the annual mean southward transport of the East Sakhalin Current (ESC) is significantly larger than the annual mean Sverdrup transport. Motivated by this observational result, transport of a western boundary current has been investigated using a simple numerical model with a western slope. This transport is defined as the instantaneous barotropic transport integrated from the western boundary to the offshore point where the barotropic velocity vanishes. The model, forced by seasonally varying wind stress, exhibits an annual mean of the western boundary current transport that is larger than that of the Sverdrup transport, as observed. The southward transport from October to March in the model nearly equals the instantaneous Sverdrup transport, while the southward transport from April to September decreases slowly. Although the Sverdrup transport in July vanishes, the southward transport in summer nearly maintains the annual mean Sverdrup transport, because the barotropic Rossby wave cannot intrude on the western slope. This summer transport causes the larger annual mean. Although there are some uncertainties in the estimation of the Sverdrup transport in the Sea of Okhotsk, the seasonal variation of the southward transport in the model is qualitatively similar to the observations.     

Contribution of a pathway through the Arctic Ocean to the re cent reduction in the ice cover

The sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean has been reducing and hit the low record in the summer of 2007. The anomaly was extremely large in the Pacific sector. The sea level height in the Bering Sea vs. the Greenland Sea has been analyzed and compared with the current meter data through the Bering Strait. A recent peak existed as a consequence of atmospheric circulation and is considered to contribute to inflow of the Pacific Water into the Arctic Basin. The timing of the Pacific Water inflow matched with the sea ice reduction in the Pacific sector and suggests a significant increase in heat flux. This component should be included in the model prediction for answering the question when the Arctic sea ice becomes a seasonal ice cover.     

Integrated magnetobiochronology of the Pliocene–Pleistocene Miyazaki succession,southern Kyushu,southwest Japan: Implications for an Early Pleistocene hiatus and defining the base of the Gelasian (P/P boundary type section) in Japan

An integrated magnetobiochronology of the Miyazaki Pliocene–Pleistocene succession in the Miyazaki area, southwest Japan, was established using planktic foraminiferal and calcareous nannofossil biostratigraphy together with paleomagnetic data. The upper Miyazaki succession in the northern Miyazaki region can be divided into the Takanabe, Hisamine (redefined), and Higoyashiki (new) Formations, in ascending order. A depositional hiatus between the Hisamine Formation and the Takanabe and/or older formations was also identified based on integrated magnetobiostratigraphy from five sections including the Nagatani River (NGT) section through the uppermost Miyazaki succession. The hiatus, herein called the Hisamine unconformity, is equivalent to the Kurotaki unconformity between the Miura and Kazusa groups of the Boso Peninsula in central Japan. The depositional hiatus recognised in the lower Pleistocene of Pacific coastal areas in southwestern and central Japan may have resulted from tectonic activity associated with a change in the subduction direction of the Philippine Sea plate, which commenced prior to ca. 2.2 Ma. The youngest unit just below the hiatus is the upper part of the Takanabe Formation in the NGT section. The NGT section represents the continuous Late Pliocene to earliest Pleistocene sequence including the Gauss/Matuyama boundary and is here proposed as the type section for the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary in Japan, which the IUGS ratified as the base of the Gelasian in 2009.     

Multiple Parameter Regularization: Numerical Solutions and Applications to the Determination of Geopotential from Precise Satellite Orbits

Kaula’s rule of thumb has been used in producing geopotential models from space geodetic measurements, including the most recent models from satellite gravity missions CHAMP. Although Xu and Rummel (Manuscr Geod 20 8–20, 1994b) suggested an alternative regularization method by introducing a number of regularization parameters, no numerical tests have ever been conducted. We have compared four methods of regularization for the determination of geopotential from precise orbits of COSMIC satellites through simulations, which include Kaula’s rule of thumb, one parameter regularization and its iterative version, and multiple parameter regularization. The simulation results show that the four methods can indeed produce good gravitational models from the precise orbits of centimetre level. The three regularization methods perform much better than Kaula’s rule of thumb by a factor of 6.4 on average beyond spherical harmonic degree 5 and by a factor of 10.2 for the spherical harmonic degrees from 8 to 14 in terms of degree variations of root mean squared errors. The maximum componentwise improvement in the root mean squared error can be up to a factor of 60. The simplest version of regularization by multiplying a positive scalar with a unit matrix is sufficient to better determine the geopotential model. Although multiple parameter regularization is theoretically attractive and can indeed eliminate unnecessary regularization for some of the harmonic coefficients, we found that it only improved its one parameter version marginally in this COSMIC example in terms of the mean squared error.     

Instability processes of mesoscale features in the Kuroshio Extension reproduced through assimilation of altimeter data into a quasi-geostrophic model using the variational method

The Kuroshio, one of the most energetic western boundary currents in the world, shows variations in its mesoscale features and recirculation gyres, providing an excellent test case of interactions between the mesoscale field and Kuroshio Extension (KE) states. A three-layer quasi-geostrophic model was used to reconstruct flow fields continuous in time and the horizontal plane from the TOPEX/POSEIDON altimeter data based on the variational method. Compared with the solutions obtained by the nudging method, the present results proved that the variational solution was closer to the real field. In the assimilation period, 1993–1997, the baroclinic instability index (BII) was defined to be the phase shift from the uppermost layer to the lowest layer with mesoscale features. In the first half of the assimilation period, the KE took the transition from the elongated to contracted states, in which BII decreased gradually, as a consequence of the KE state shift. In the second half period, BII increased in the downstream region just west of the Shatsky Rise, in which baroclinic instability contributed to the final stage of the contracted state, and was followed by rapidly weakened instability as a trigger of the opposite transition from the contracted to elongated states. The wind-driven recirculation gyre played an active role on the KE transition in the first half period, although not in the second half.     

On the Influence of Sea Surface Height Variability on Satellite Altimeter Derived Gravity

The effect of sea surface height (SSH) variability is one of the primary factors that limit the accuracy and resolution of altimeter-derived gravity values. We propose a method to estimate the influence of variation of the sea surface height on the accuracy of satellite-derived gravity by simulation technique, with a case study around Indonesian waters. Wederived an Indonesian marine gravity map using the Geosat-geodetic mission (GM). Since most of the area studied is located around coastal and shallow areas, the measurement of SSH of this area is less accurate. To obtain a distribution of SSH variability over the study area, Topex/Poseidon (T/P) data were first processed and assessed. Processing 52 cycles of the Topex/Poseidon data, the root mean square (RMS) of SSH variability for each cycle was found to vary from 1 to 179 cm. Further, for the purpose of estimating the accuracy of altimeter-derived gravity, we derived several levels of Gaussian noise, computed simulation data by adding the Gaussian noise to Geosat data, and determined simulated gravity maps. Based on the distribution of RMS values from T/P data and standard deviation (STD) differences between the simulated and the original gravity maps, we estimated the accuracy of the gravity map. Around Indonesian waters, the accuracy of the gravity map influenced by SSH variation was estimated to be within the range 0.8~93 mgal.     

State Estimation of the North Pacific Ocean by a Four-Dimensional Variational Data Assimilation Experiment

A four-dimensional variational data assimilation system has been applied to an experiment to describe the dynamic state of the North Pacific Ocean. A synthesis of available observational records and a sophisticated ocean general circulation model produces a dynamically consistent dataset, which, in contrast to the nudging approach, provides realistic features of the seasonally-varying ocean circulation with no artificial sources/sinks for temperature and salinity fields. This new dataset enables us to estimate heat and water mass transports in addition to the qualification of water mass formation and movement processes. A sensitivity experiment on our assimilation system reveals that the origin of the North Pacific Intermediate Water can be traced back to the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea in the subarctic region and to the subtropical Kuroshio region further south. These results demonstrate that our data assimilation system is a very powerful tool for the identification and characterization of ocean variabilities and for our understanding of the dynamic state of ocean circulation. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.