The Denmark Strait Overflow (DSO) is an important contributor to the lower limb of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Determining DSO formation and its pathways is not only important for local oceanography but also critical to estimating the state and variability of the AMOC. Despite prior attempts to understand the DSO sources, its upstream pathways and circulation remain uncertain due to short-term (3–5 days) variability. This makes it challenging to study the DSO from observations. Given this complexity, this study maps the upstream pathways and along-pathway changes in its water properties, using Lagrangian backtracking of the DSO sources in a realistic numerical ocean simulation. The Lagrangian pathways confirm that several branches contribute to the DSO from the north such as the East Greenland Current (EGC), the separated EGC (sEGC), and the North Icelandic Jet (NIJ). Moreover, the model results reveal additional pathways from south of Iceland, which supplied over 16% of the DSO annually and over 25% of the DSO during winter of 2008, when the NAO index was positive. The southern contribution is about 34% by the end of March. The southern pathways mark a more direct route from the near-surface subpolar North Atlantic to the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW), and needs to be explored further, with in situ observations.

Simulations of ocean currents using numerical circulation models are becoming increasingly realistic. At the same time, these models generate increasingly large volumes of model output data. These trends make analysis of the model data harder for two reasons. First, researchers must use high-performance data-analysis clusters to access these large data sets. Second, they must post-process the data to extract oceanographically-useful information. Moreover, the increasing model realism encourages researchers to compare simulations to observations of the natural ocean. To achieve this task model data must be analyzed in the way observational oceanographers analyze field measurements; and, ideally, by the observational oceanographers themselves. The OceanSpy package addresses these needs.

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Deep ocean passages are advantageous sites for long term monitoring of deep transport and other physical properties relevant to climate. Rotating hydraulic theory provides potential for simplifying monitoring strategy by reducing the number of quantities that need to be measured. However, the applicability of these theories has been limited by idealizations such as restriction to zero or uniform potential vorticity ( pv ) and to channels with rectangular cross sections. Here the relationship between the flow characteristics in a canonical sea-strait and its upstream condition is studied using uniform pv rotating hydraulic theory and a reduced-gravity shallow-water numerical model that allows for variation in pv . The paper is focused mainly on the sensitivity of the hydraulic solution to the strait geometry. We study the dynamics of channels with continuously varying (parabolic) cross-sections to account for the rounded nature of sea-strait topographies and potentially improve monitoring strategies for realistic channel geometries. The results showthat far enough from the channel entrance, the hydraulically controlled flowin the strait is insensitive to the basin circulation regardless of parabolic curvature. The controlled transport relation is derived for the case of uniform pv theory. Comparing the model to theory, we find that the measurement of the wetted edges of the interface height at the critical section can be used to estimate the volume flux. Based on this finding, we suggest three monitoring strategies for transport estimation and compare the estimates with the observed values at the Faroe Bank Channel. The results showed that the estimated transports are within the range of observed values.