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Canada Basin: shelf-basin exchange and mechanisms

W. Maslowski, E. Watanabe, G. Nurser

The major science questions for these experiments are: (1) How much of the heat and fresh water associated with the Pacific Water are transported from the Chukchi shelf to the Canada Basin across the Beaufort shelf break by meso-scale eddies?  (2) What are the mechanisms controlling generation and development of meso-scale eddies which are thought to play an important role in the shelf-basin mass, heat and fresh water exchanges? Conditions for this experiment and model output parameters are presented below.

a.       Questions :

  • How much of heat and freshwater associated with PW are transported from Chukchi shelf to Canada Basin across Beaufort shelf break by mesoscale eddies ?
  • What is mechanisms controlling generation and development of mesoscale eddies which play a great role in the shelf-to-basin transport ?

b.      Experiments :

  • Drive eddy-resolving or eddy-permitting sea ice-ocean model by climatological or interannually varying atmospheric forcing
  • Horizontal model resolution should be less than 10 km (W. Maslowski’s NAME : 9 km or 2 km?; E. Watanabe’s COCO : 2.5 km; G. Nurser’s model : global OCCAM 1/12 °, ~ 8 km resolution in the Arctic)
  • Compare the simulation results with some observations (e.g. Pickart, 2004; Pickart et al., 2005) and idealized model experiments (e.g. Spall, 2008)

c.       Which fields :

  • Monthly mean time series of shelf-to-basin transport of PW tracer provided at Bering Strait, heat (referenced to seawater freezing point ?) and freshwater (referenced to 34.8 psu) across Beaufort shelf break
  • Vertical section of PW, temperature, salinity and velocity across Barrow Canyon and Beaufort shelf break
  • Mean and eddy kinetic energy in Canada Basin