EGU2020-8569
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-8569
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

On the inter-connectivity of volume transports through Arctic Straits

Agatha De Boer1, Estanislao Gavilan Pascual-Ahuir2, David Stevens3, Léon Chafik4, David Hutchinson1, Qiong Zhang5, Louise Sime6, and Andrew Willmott7
Agatha De Boer et al.
  • 1Bert Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Department of Geoscience, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden (agatha.deboer@geo.su.se)
  • 2Institute of Physical Oceanography, Hohai University, Nanjing, China
  • 3Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, School of Mathematics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
  • 4Bert Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Department of Meteorology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 5Bert Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 6British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK.
  • 7School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK

Arctic heat and freshwater budgets are highly sensitive to volume transports through Arctic-Subarctic straits. Here we investigate how the volume transports through these straits adjust to each other to maintain a mass balance in the Arctic on annual timescales. To this end, we use three models; two coupled global climate models, one with a third-degree horizontal ocean resolution (HiGEM1.1) and one with a twelfth-degree horizontal ocean resolution (HadGEM3), and one ocean-only model with an idealized polar basin (tenth-degree horizontal resolution). The two global climate models indicate that there is a strong anti-correlation between the Bering Strait throughflow and the transport through the Nordic Seas, a second strong anti-correlation between the transport through the Canadian Artic Archipelago (CAA) and the Nordic Seas transport, and a third strong anti-correlation between the Fram Strait and the Barents Sea throughflows. We find that part of the strait correlations is due to the strait transports being coincidentally driven by large-scale atmospheric forcing patterns such as the Arctic Oscillation. However, there is also a role for fast wave adjustments of some straits flows to perturbations in other straits since atmospheric forcing of individual strait flows alone cannot lead to near mass balance fortuitously every year. Idealized experiments with an ocean model (NEMO3.6) that investigate such causal strait relations suggest that perturbations in the Bering Strait are compensated preferentially in the Fram Strait due to the narrowness of the western Arctic shelf and the deeper depth of the Fram Strait.

How to cite: De Boer, A., Gavilan Pascual-Ahuir, E., Stevens, D., Chafik, L., Hutchinson, D., Zhang, Q., Sime, L., and Willmott, A.: On the inter-connectivity of volume transports through Arctic Straits, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-8569, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-8569, 2020

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