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Mar 17, 2020 · The Arctic region is experiencing the most rapid environmental changes on Earth, with unparalleled air temperature increases, a warming ocean, and melting permafrost, snow, and ice. The ocean is a central control via Arctic Ocean warming, freshening, and circulation dynamics that link to the sea ice, atmosphere, and terrestrial environment.
The Arctic Ocean, with borders as delineated by the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), including Hudson Bay (some of which is south of 57°N latitude, off the map) and all other marginal seas. The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceans.
Dec 14, 2021 · major chokepoint is the southern Chukchi Sea (northern access to the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Strait); strategic location between North America and Russia; shortest marine link between the extremes of eastern and western Russia; floating research stations operated by the US and Russia; maximum snow cover in March or April about 20 to 50 ...
- Introduction and Setting
- Circulation and Stratification: from The Bottom Up
- Connections with The World Ocean
- Circulation in The Arctic Ocean: Wind Forcing
- Circulation in The Arctic Ocean: Thermohaline Forcing
- Polar Outflow and Double Estuary Exchanges
- Freshwater Storage and Upper Layer Circulation
- Internal Mixing Processes
- Outlook
In 1990, the German oceanographer Detlef Quadfasel went as tourist on a cruise on the Soviet icebreaker Rossiya to the North Pole, taking with him expendable temperature probes. He discovered that the temperature of the mid-depth Atlantic layer was more than one degree above that reported from previous measurements (Quadfasel et al., 1991). This ob...
The advective flows into the Arctic Ocean have long been recognized. In the mid-nineteenth century, the possibility that these warm inflows could influence the ice cover and create open water in the interior of the Arctic Ocean was seriously discussed (Petermann, 1865; Bent, 1872). Fridtjof Nansen’s drift with Fram demonstrated that this was not th...
The largest exchanges between the Arctic Ocean and the rest of the world ocean occur in the North Atlantic. There, warm Atlantic water crosses the Greenland-Scotland Ridge and enters the Nordic Seas (the Greenland, Iceland, and Norwegian Seas), which form a large anteroom for the two Atlantic entrances to the Arctic Ocean, the shallow (200 m) Baren...
The Upper Layers
The circulation in the Arctic Ocean is forced mechanically by the wind and by density changes caused by cooling and heating, by freezing and melting, and by freshwater input. The wind-driven Ekman transport dominates in the surface layer. Sea ice and the uppermost layer are mainly driven directly by the wind, but also by the dynamical topography created by the spatially varying Ekman transports. The large-scale wind field over the Arctic Ocean forces a clockwise circulation in the Amerasian B...
The Barotropic Wind-Driven Circulation
Below the low salinity upper layer, the stratification is weak, and the water columns appear to follow the depth contours. In both the Arctic Ocean and the Nordic Seas, the bathymetry forms closed f/H contours, where f is the Coriolis parameter and H the ocean depth. This allows geostrophic barotropic flows to circulate around the basins along the f/Hcontours (Nøst and Isachsen, 2003). The vorticity added by the large-scale wind field is transferred to the deeper part of the water column, whe...
The Arctic Ocean is a global-scale double estuary (Carmack and Wassmann, 2006) in that the density of the entering Atlantic water both increases and decreases, creating return flows in the upper layers as well as in the deep, as shown schematically in Figure 3. In the Norwegian Sea and in the southern Barents Sea the Atlantic water is cooled and it...
The export of the less saline upper layer occurs through several passages, the narrow straits in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Fram Strait in the East Greenland Current. The outflows have the coast to the right, and their widths are determined by the internal Rossby radius, the ratio of the internal longwave velocity to the Coriolis frequency...
The least saline upper layer is found in the Amerasian Basin, and in particular in the Beaufort Gyre, where the water column stores more than 20 m of freshwater (relative to 34.80). This accumulation of freshwater is attributed to the clockwise atmospheric circulation over the Beaufort Sea that drives Ekman transports toward the center of the gyre...
Wind and the seasonal heating and cooling cycle are the main external forcings on the Arctic Ocean. In winter, the upper layer is homogenized by ice formation and brine rejection, and wind stress reaches down to the strong permanent halocline. In summer, sea ice melting creates a low salinity meltwater layer that inhibits deep wind mixing in spite ...
As noted in the introduction, Quadfasel et al.’s (1991) observations of Arctic warming three decades ago altered our perception of the Arctic Ocean, from being a place in steady state to one that is highly variable. They expressed the urgent need to understand this system under a rapidly changing climate. Indeed, today the persistent loss of sea ic...
Oct 16, 2015 · Pacific Water (PW) enters the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait and brings in heat, fresh water, and nutrients from the northern Bering Sea. The circulation of PW in the central Arctic Ocean is only partially understood due to the lack of observations.
- Yevgeny Aksenov, Michael Karcher, Andrey Proshutinsky, Rüdiger Gerdes, Beverly de Cuevas, Elena Golu...
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Jan 6, 2020 · Key Points. An observed teleconnection between Pacific Ocean SSTs and Arctic sea ice extent is analyzed in 30 fully coupled GCMs participating in CMIP5. Summer SST anomalies in the Pacific Ocean modulate September Arctic sea ice loss through changes in upper Arctic air conditions.
Apr 16, 2007 · Arctic Ocean Circulation. This complex circulation system in the Arctic—which impacts the entire food web—is in a delicate balance. In recent years, scientists have documented changes in the Arctic system, including a dramtatic reduction in sea ice cover and a weakening of the Beaufort Gyre circulation system, that are attributed to climate ...
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