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

南大洋的水域被一股环绕南极大陆的巨大洋流所控制，这股洋流被称为南极环极流（ACC）。大西洋、太平洋和印度洋连接在一起。它在这些海洋盆地之间运输热量、盐、溶解气体、营养物质和生物物种方面起着重要作用。南大洋在缓慢的全球海洋翻转环流中也起着关键作用。从北大西洋深处而来的冷的、含盐的稠密的水在南大洋的环流中到达。在这里，海洋-大气-冰之间会发生强烈的相互作用，使海水变暖变新鲜，改变其密度，然后继续向北返回全球之旅。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，特别是那些与洋流中的海洋漩涡有关的过程。这些漩涡是什么？生活在北欧的人都很熟悉，那里的主导风向通常是由西向东。风暴，在天气图上被称为数百公里大小的异常低压迁移区域，以复杂的方式与盛行风相互作用。在南大洋，这些风暴的类似物是海洋涡流，尽管它们通常要小得多，只有几十公里的大小。就像在大气中一样，它们与主流洋流（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相互作用。与涡旋有关的过程被认为是决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.