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How is the ocean filled?
Author(s) -
Gebbie Geoffrey,
Huybers Peter
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2011gl046769
Subject(s) - ocean current , advection , water mass , deep ocean water , ocean heat content , geology , atmosphere (unit) , seawater , ocean general circulation model , thermohaline circulation , surface water , environmental science , oceanography , climatology , meteorology , general circulation model , climate change , geography , physics , environmental engineering , thermodynamics
The ocean surface rapidly exchanges heat, freshwater, and gases with the atmosphere, but once water sinks into the ocean interior, the inherited properties of seawater are closely conserved. Previous water‐mass decompositions have described the oceanic interior as being filled by just a few different property combinations, or water masses. Here we apply a new inversion technique to climatological tracer distributions to find the pathways by which the ocean is filled from over 10,000 surface regions, based on the discretization of the ocean surface at 2° by 2° resolution. The volume of water originating from each surface location is quantified in a global framework, and can be summarized by the estimate that 15% of the surface area fills 85% of the ocean interior volume. Ranked from largest to smallest, the volume contributions scaled by surface area follow a power‐law distribution with an exponent of −1.09 ± 0.03 that appears indicative of the advective‐diffusive filling characteristics of the ocean circulation, as demonstrated using a simple model. This work quantifies the connection between the surface and interior ocean, allowing insight into ocean composition, atmosphere‐ocean interaction, and the transient response of the ocean to a changing climate.