Gyre Closure in the Western Equatorial Pacific Ocean

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

0137728/Wajsowicz This project seeks to untangle the complex pathways taken by water from different sources as they meet in the western tropical Pacific. One particular premise that will be tested is the idea that the location and strength of the Mindanao and Halmahera Eddies and of the Mindanao Dome may exert a strong influence on the relative mixture of water masses entering the North Equatorial Countercurrent, the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC) and the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF). In part, this study is motivated by differences between the relative mixture of water of North and South Pacific origin in the EUC and ITF seen in data and the proportions seen in numerical general circulation models. The approach involves the dynamical study of two process models. One is a multi-layer diagnostic model, the second is a high-resolution version of the multi-layer POSEIDON model. In addition, the variability of the tropical gyre closure in the output from a GFDL data assimilation run.