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SUMMARY:Submesoscale instabilities at ocean fronts - Christian Buckingham 
 (ex-Univ. Soton\, soon to be BAS)
DTSTART:20161207T110000Z
DTEND:20161207T120000Z
UID:TALK69476@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Dave Munday
DESCRIPTION:Climate prediction is on a lot of our minds. Businessmen want 
 to plan for the future\, reinsurance companies hope to capitalise on extre
 me weather events and scientists seek to motivate their often abstract res
 earch ideas :) The challenge with climate prediction\, however\, is that i
 t requires sufficient understanding of a vast array of small- and large-sc
 ale processes in order to have good predictive skill. A good example in th
 e atmosphere is knowledge of cloud-physics. Here\, we add to this vast arr
 ay by describing a physical process that occurs at small scales in the oce
 an and not yet represented in climate-scale ocean models: winds blowing do
 wn ocean fronts. Using (1) a simple model of wind-driven buoyancy flux\, (
 2) European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) model reanaly
 sis and (3) an unprecedented suite of upper ocean observations from the op
 en-ocean North Atlantic (this rather "mundane" location offers us the abil
 ity to study the physics in a regime not dominated by strong mean flows.) 
 including potential vorticity and turbulent dissipation rate\, we demonstr
 ate that winds blowing down ocean fronts catalyse convective instabilities
  that then generate turbulence\, with implications for mixing and associat
 ed changes in upper ocean stratification. Importantly\, this mechanism is 
 found to dominate over surface buoyancy fluxes in terms of turbulence prod
 uction\, turning our understanding of ocean-atmosphere buoyancy flux on it
 s head. Taken together with the upper ocean’s role in imparting deep oce
 an properties to the atmosphere (and vice-versa)\, these results point to 
 the importance of parameterising submesoscale instabilities at ocean front
 s in climate models.
LOCATION:British Antarctic Survey\, Room 330B
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