How Much Heat and Salt Are Transported Into the South China Sea by Mesoscale Eddies?

Yang, Yikai; Zeng, Lili; Wang, Qiang

doi:10.1029/2020ef001857

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…EKE maps are computed using the formula EKE = 1 2 (u 02 g +v 02 g ) where u 0 g and v 0 g indicate meridional and zonal geostrophic velocity anomalies, respectively. To date, studies have confirmed the capability of eddies to transport saline Kuroshio water into the SCS (Jia and Liu, 2004;Zhang et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…This salt water moves along the northern slope of the basin, extending as far as the southeastern part of Hainan Island (Wang et al, 2015;Yi et al, 2020). Eddies can mix this part of the saltwater in the upper layer while moving northwestward, which has been confirmed as a key dynamic player in introducing and redistributing this Pacific water mass into the SCS (Yang et al, 2021).…”

Section: Distribution Of Monopole and Dipole Modesmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…As a tropical marginal sea connecting the Indo-Pacific oceans, the South China Sea (SCS) features vigorous mesoscale eddy activity. Previous studies have examined the statistical characteristics of eddies (Wang et al, 2003;Xiu et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2011;He et al, 2018), their influence on near-sea-surface characteristics (He et al, 2016;Sun et al, 2018;He et al, 2019) and their induced ocean tracer transport in the SCS (Chen et al, 2012;Yang et al, 2019;Ding et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Eddy-induced sea surface salinity changes in the South China Sea

Yang

Guo²,

Zeng³

et al. 2023

Front. Mar. Sci.

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Eddy-induced sea surface salinity (SSS) changes are systematically studied in the South China Sea (SCS) by using Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite salinity data from 2015 to 2021 for the first time. All eddies in the SCS during this period are analysed, and two normalized eddy composites are reconstructed under the long-term basin mean. In general, anticyclonic eddies (AEs) tend to result in lower salinity than cyclonic eddies (CEs) in the upper ocean. The salinity anomalies of the AE and CE composites are dominated by dipole and monopole structures, respectively. The different patterns in eddy-induced salinity anomalies are generally controlled by horizontal and vertical advections, which is further confirmed by their seasonal evolutions. A spatiotemporal decomposition of these salinity anomaly patterns suggests that the dipole and monopole patterns account for more than 70% of the salinity variability. All the eddies in the SCS are monopole-dominated and dipole-supplemented overall. This finding infers a relatively uniform eddy-induced salinity structure across the SCS and provides an observational-based metric for future model studies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Distribution Of Monopole and Dipole Modesmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Eddy-induced sea surface salinity changes in the South China Sea

Yang

Guo²,

Zeng³

et al. 2023

Front. Mar. Sci.

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“…These anomalies quantify how much T and S vary when following an isopycnal. They are used to quantify the amount of heat and salt transported by the eddy (Laxenaire et al, 2019;Y. Yang et al, 2021).…”

Section: Potential Density Field Decompositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the 3D structure of Anticyclonic Eddies from In situ Data

Barabinot,

Speich,

Carton

2023

Preprint

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Mesoscale eddies are ubiquitous in the global ocean. Most of them are materially coherent: they advect a different water mass in their core than in the surrounding water, according to studies based on in situ observations and Lagrangian techniques. In parallel, laboratory experiments have shown that eddies have the ability to locally modify the stratification according to the thermal wind balance, without necessarily contain heterogeneous water. These two types of density anomalies associated with mesoscale eddies are often erroneously confused in the literature. Here we propose a new theoretical decomposition of the potential density field in the core of eddies to assess their respective amplitude and dynamical effect. This allows the modelling of their 3D shape and the estimation of the importance of each term. This decomposition is applied to 6 anticyclonic eddies sampled during the EUREC4A-OA, METEOR 124 and PHYSINDIEN 2011 in situ experiments. We show that the anomaly corresponding to the slope of the isopycnals is the largest contributor to the total density anomaly. Its vertical shape is nearly Gaussian, but also depends on the local background stratification. The horizontal density gradient associated with the trapped water mass adds a second order term to the total anomaly and can be neglected for the study of eddy dynamics. The horizontal structures of the eddies studied are consistent with previous studies and show an exponential-alpha shape.

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“…An eddy can be intuitively defined as a region of instantaneous streamline spiraling around a central point [1,2]. The vertical depth of eddies has a wide-ranging impact, as it can bring cold water and nutrients from the deep ocean to the surface or push warm surface water into deeper ocean layers [3], thus affecting the ocean's mixed layer, density stratification, and even deeper ocean dynamics [4][5][6][7]. In oceanography, eddies with radii on the order of the first baroclinic Rossby radius and lasting for days to months are referred to as mesoscale eddies, while eddies with radii smaller than the first baroclinic Rossby radius but larger than the boundary layer turbulence scale and lasting for hours to days are called submesoscale eddies [8,9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Submesoscale Short-Lived Eddies in the Southwestern Taiwan Strait Observed by High-Frequency Surface-Wave Radars

Zhao,

Yue,

Wang

et al. 2024

Remote Sensing

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Surface currents obtained from the high-frequency surface-wave radars (HFSWRs) installed along the coast of Fujian Province are utilized to characterize submesoscale eddies in the southwestern Taiwan Strait from 29 January to 26 March 2013. The algorithm based on vector geometry (VG) has been applied to datasets and a total of 414 (161 anticyclonic and 253 cyclonic eddies) were obtained. Eddies with both rotations had a relatively short lifespan (≤3.7 h), and their radii were in the range of 5–22.5 km. Eddies with a lifespan of over 30 minutes were more likely to occur north of the Taiwan Strait shoals and move eastward or northeastward. The deviation of moving directions of eddies with a moving distance of more than 20 km was within 18°. Moreover, eddies could hardly hold their original forms with cyclones extending in the east-west and compressing in the north-south direction, and anticyclones were the opposite. The vorticity and strain rate were proportional to the square of the energy intensity (EI). This study shows that the array HFSWRs have a strong capability to observe short-lived submesoscale eddies.

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How Much Heat and Salt Are Transported Into the South China Sea by Mesoscale Eddies?

Cited by 8 publications

References 65 publications

Eddy-induced sea surface salinity changes in the South China Sea

Eddy-induced sea surface salinity changes in the South China Sea

On the 3D structure of Anticyclonic Eddies from In situ Data

Submesoscale Short-Lived Eddies in the Southwestern Taiwan Strait Observed by High-Frequency Surface-Wave Radars

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