Role of Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics in Air-Sea Coupling over the Southern Ocean

大气和海洋在广泛的空间和时间尺度上相互作用，这些相互作用调节天气和气候的可变性，以及海洋对异常热量和碳的吸收。在海洋中尺度(约10至100公里尺度)，平流足够强烈，足以在海洋表面温度中产生强烈的梯度。当空气吹过这些非常锋利的锋面时，大气不能完全调节，这导致大气冷却(变暖)温暖(冷)的海洋表面温度等重大影响。这些影响在南大洋很明显，那里有很强的中尺度可变性。该项目的主要目标是探索南大洋中尺度的大气-海洋相互作用，并了解海洋中尺度如何产生调节这些相互作用的尖锐的海洋表面温度锋。这项研究将有助于为全球气候建模工作提供信息，以确定正确捕捉海-气相互作用所需的关键过程和所需的海洋分辨率。该项目将促进一名女性研究人员的职业发展，并将在物理海洋学和气候科学领域培训两名研究生。中尺度的大气-海洋耦合在气候变异性、大气和海洋动力学、大气气体吸收和生物地球化学方面发挥着重要但知之甚少的作用。了解这种耦合对于气候模拟具有很大的现实意义，因为绝大多数气候模式不能完全解决中尺度问题，这导致了模拟中的偏差。该项目的主要假设是，海洋中尺度海面温度异常变率的很大一部分是由中尺度海洋平流驱动的。分析将在一个完全耦合的模式系统中进行，在该系统中，中尺度海表面温度异常既影响大气，又受大气影响，研究将采用先进的理论考虑、全面的耦合模拟和有针对性的理想化研究，所有这些都在海洋中具有高分辨率。这项研究的重点是南大洋，这既是因为它在气候中的重要作用，也是因为那里普遍存在中尺度变化，但我们的结论预计将适用于世界大洋的其他部分。这项研究的一个特别优势是将综合气候模拟与理想化模拟和理论相结合，在完全耦合的状态下与动态一致的中尺度海洋环流相结合。

The atmosphere and ocean interact on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, and these interactions modulate weather and climate variability, as well as oceanic uptake of anomalous heat and carbon. At the oceanic mesoscale (about 10 to 100 km scales), advection is sufficiently strong to create strong gradients in sea surface temperature. As air blows across these very sharp fronts, the atmosphere cannot fully adjust, which leads to significant effects such as atmospheric cooling (warming) of warm (cold) sea surface temperatures. These effects are well pronounced in the Southern Ocean, where powerful mesoscale variability abounds. The main goal of this project is to explore mesoscale atmosphere-ocean interactions in the Southern Ocean and to understand how the ocean mesoscale creates sharp sea surface temperature fronts that modulate these interactions. This study will serve to inform global climate modeling efforts in terms of the identifying the key processes and required ocean resolution needed to correctly capture air-sea interactions. The project will advance a career of a female investigator and will train two graduate students in the fields of Physical Oceanography and Climate Science.Atmosphere-ocean coupling at mesoscale plays an important, but poorly understood role in climate variability, atmosphere and ocean dynamics, uptake of atmospheric gases and biogeochemistry. Understanding of this coupling has large practical importance for climate modeling, because a vast majority of climate models cannot fully resolve the mesoscale, which leads to biases in the simulations. The main hypothesis of this project is that a significant part of the sea surface temperature anomaly variability at the oceanic mesoscale is driven by mesoscale oceanic advection. The analysis will be carried out in a fully coupled model system in which mesoscale sea surface temperature anomalies both affect and are affected by the atmosphere, and the study will employ a blend of advanced theoretical considerations, comprehensive coupled simulations and targeted idealized studies, all with high resolution in the ocean. The particular focus of this study is on the Southern Ocean, both because of its large role in climate and because mesoscale variability is ubiquitous there, but our conclusions are expected to be relevant to the other parts of the World Ocean. One particular strength of this research is the merging of comprehensive climate simulations with a combination of idealized modeling and theory, in a fully coupled regime and with dynamically consistent mesoscale ocean circulation.