New Approaches to Characterising the Influence of Eddies in the Southern Ocean

南大洋的水域主要由环绕南极大陆的巨大洋流主导，称为南极绕极流(ACC)。ACC将大西洋、太平洋和印度洋连接在一起。它在这些大洋盆地之间传输热量、盐分、溶解气体、营养物质和生物物种方面发挥着重要作用。南大洋在缓慢的全球颠覆的世界海洋环流中也发挥着关键作用。从北阿尔塔尼亚海深处一路送来的又冷又咸的稠密水到达南大洋的这个环流中。在这里，可以发生强烈的海洋-大气-冰的相互作用，使水变得新鲜和温暖，改变其密度，然后继续向北返回其全球旅程。了解决定这些海洋环流的物理过程对于准确预测未来气候至关重要。这个项目的目的是研究其中的一些过程，特别是与流动中的海洋涡流有关的过程。这些漩涡是什么？居住在北欧的人都很熟悉，普遍的风向通常是从西向东。风暴在天气图上被称为数百公里大小的异常低压迁移区，它们以复杂的方式与这种盛行的风相互作用。在南大洋，这些风暴类似于海洋涡旋，尽管它们通常要小得多，规模只有几十公里。就像在大气层中一样，它们与盛行的洋流ACC的相互作用是复杂的。这个项目的目标是更好地理解这种互动。与涡旋相关的过程被认为是确定上述全球翻转环流的重要因素。

The waters of the Southern Ocean are dominated by a vast current that circles around the Antarctic continent, known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). The ACC connects together the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. It serves an important role in transporting heat, salt, dissolved gases, nutrients and biological species between these ocean basins. The Southern Ocean also plays a critical role in the slow global overturning circulation of the world's ocean. Cold, salty dense water coming all the way from the deep North Altantic arrives in this circulation at the Southern Ocean. Here intense ocean-atmosphere-ice interactions can occur that freshen and warm the water, changing its density, before it continues back northward on its global journey. Understanding the physical processes which determine these ocean circulations is vital to accurately predict future climate. The aim of this project is to investigate some of these processes, in particular those associated with ocean eddies in the flow. What are these eddies? It is familiar to those living in Northern Europe that the prevailing wind direction is typically from west to east. Storms, familiar on weather maps as migrating regions of anomalous low pressure with sizes hundreds of kilometers, interact with this prevailing wind in complex ways. In the Southern Ocean, the analogues of these storms are the ocean eddies, although they are typically much smaller with sizes of tens of kilometers. Just as in the atmosphere, their interaction with the prevailing current, the ACC, is complex. The goal of this project is to better understand this interaction. Processes associated with the eddies are thought to be important in determining the global overturning circulation described above.