ATOC 5051, Fall 2007 — Notes & Calendar

ATOC 5051: Introduction to Physical Oceanography

Or, Notions for the Motions of the Oceans. This is a core course for graduate students covering the basic tools needed for oceanography. Observational, dynamical, numerical, and descriptive methods are discussed and used to get a sense of the historical and contemporary understanding of the motions of the oceans.

You can access the syllabus, proceedings, class notes, and class files.

ATOC 5051

Introduction to Physical Oceanography, 2007

Assignment 5: Rivers in the Sea?

Choose a western boundary current in the ECCO dataset available as preprocessed netcdf in fox-kemper.com/data (I've regridded to eliminate staggered grids and time-averaged for you). Study its volume transport (via u and v) and return flow (via the Sverdrup relation). Time mean fields are fine, but you might want to check out the full set.

Quantitative aspects: Does the budget across a latitude line close? Is the flow at the surface or deep or throughout? Is there a northward heat flux implied by this flow?

That is, consider \int v dz. There are 3 ways to get at it:

1. Sum up v delta z from ECCO velocities
2. Sverdrup relation (\int v dz = curl(tau)/(rho beta) should agree in the interior, but not in the WBC
3. Geostrophic relation (\int v dz = g H deta/dx / f), should agree across the region.