Fission of Heton-like Vortices under Sea Ice

Close interactions among vertically stacked pairs of counter-rotating eddies under sea ice were investigated in numerical experiments. The numerical model contains a stratified ocean capped by an ice layer. Under the ice layer, a shallow brine source produces a top cyclone and a submerged anticyclone, while a shallow freshening source generates a top anticyclone and a submerged cyclone. Ice-exerted friction would dissipate the top eddy, leaving the submerged one in lone existence. In this work the winning vorticity is sought from group settings. Arrays of equally spaced salinity sources and sinks, alternate in sign but equal in strength, are employed to produce rows of vertically stacked eddy pairs. Fission occurs when adjacent vortex centers are separated by less than one Rossby radius. This process ejects parcels of density anomalies to the ambient ocean in upper depths. Low salinity anomalies are quickly dispersed into a thin surface layer and are unable to regenerate submerged eddies. High salinity parcels, being difficult to disperse, often maintain or regenerate submerged anticyclones below. Fission is particularly effective if a single row of salinity forcing is used. With multiple rows, fission is active only in the outer rows. The strong interaction among closely packed eddies operates in time scales of tens of days, helping explain the predominance of submerged anticyclones under Arctic sea ice.     

Numerical study of tidal front with varying sharpness in spring and neap tidal cycle

The temporal variation of tidal-front sharpness (i.e., the maximal gradient of sea surface temperature (SST)) in Iyo-Nada, Japan has been investigated using SST obtained by a commercial ferryboat. Tidal-front sharpness varies in time with a period of 15 days. A numerical model approach was also adopted to investigate the temporal variation of frontal sharpness. The numerical model, which contains a restoring term to express the tidal front reconstructed fortnightly by tides, reproduces the tidal front accompanied by growing and/or decaying frontal waves. The amplitude of modeled frontal sharpness agrees well with the observation. The amplitude of sharpness is much smaller than the observed value, unless frontal waves develop along the modeled front. This therefore implies that tidal fronts are destroyed mainly due to growing frontal waves, and are restored fortnightly at spring tides. We quantitatively evaluated the subsurface intrusion of seawater into the stratified region from the mixed region by conducting passive-tracer experiments. We find that the cross-frontal transport with frontal waves is 4.9 times larger than that without frontal waves. In addition, the cross-frontal transport reaches a long distance (about 25 km) because of heton (mushroom)-type eddies developing along the front with frontal waves.