Ocean Circulation Kinetic Energy: Reservoirs, Sources, and Sinks

By Raffaele Ferrari, Carl Wunsch. 2009

990 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9efa7083a04fcab18d5b14f91cbbd71eddc85e4

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Oceanography

Citations in the corpus

Radiation and Dissipation of Internal Waves Generated by Geostrophic Motions Impinging on Small-Scale Topography: Application to the Southern Ocean (2010, background): “Ferrari and Wunsch (2008) show that 80%–90% of the KE of the ocean is in geostrophic eddies generated by instabilities of the mean currents.”
The Role of Mesoscale Eddies in the Rectification of the Southern Ocean Response to Climate Change (2010, background): “Other than the tropical oceans, the oceanic EKE is dominated by eddies at the geostrophic scale (Ferrari and Wunsch 2009); thus, a comparison between observed and modeled EKE is a good indicator for the representation of the mesoscale eddy field in the model.”
The Dependence of Southern Ocean Meridional Overturning on Wind Stress (2011, background): “Furthermore, because topographic form drag does not participate in the energy cycle (Ferrari and Wunsch 2009), we can expect (25) to hold in more realistic models with topography.”
Significant sink of ocean-eddy energy near western boundaries (2010, neutral): “dtd" [ ]> Ocean eddies generated through instability of the mean flow are a vital component of the energy budget of the global ocea”
Challenges and Prospects in Ocean Circulation Models (2019, background): “Global estimates of the energy available for diapycnal mixing from the tide and wind (Ferrari and Wunsch, 2009) are a valuable diagnostic for evaluation of mixing parameterizations (MacKinnon et al.”
Southern Ocean eddy phenomenology (2015, background): “…eddies, coherent vortices evolving at temporal scales of weeks to years and populating the world’s oceans at any moment by thousands, likely contribute the major fraction to mesoscale kinetic energy (CSS11), which itself dominates the ocean’s total kinetic energy [Ferrari and Wunsch, 2009].”
Open-Ocean Submesoscale Motions: A Full Seasonal Cycle of Mixed Layer Instabilities from Gliders (2016, background): “Lateral buoyancy gradients serve as reservoirs of both potential and kinetic energy, the latter occurring through thermal wind (Haine and Marshall 1998; Ferrari and Wunsch 2009).”
Mapping the Energy Cascade in the North Atlantic Ocean: The Coarse-Graining Approach (2017, background): “n et al. (2017)). An enduring paradigm for oceanic energy pathways between large-scale and mesoscale ow Gill et al. (1974); Rhines (1975); Salmon (1978, 1980); Smith and Vallis (2002); Vallis (2017); Ferrari and Wunsch (2009), is based on baroclinic instability and homogeneous quasigeostrophic (QG) ”
Dynamics of Winds and Currents Coupled to Surface Waves (2010, background): “A resonant condition in the ocean is set up when storms generate large-amplitude wind stress that rotates with the surface currents over an extended period, as discussed by Ferrari & Wunsch (2009).”
Scales, Growth Rates, and Spectral Fluxes of Baroclinic Instability in the Ocean (2011, background): “However, Ferrari and Wunsch (2009) note that the approximate agreement between linear theory and observations support the view that baroclinic instability of available potential energy (APE) in the mean currents is the main eddy kinetic energy source.”
Internal waves and turbulence in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (2013, methodology): “3 of Ferrari and Wunsch (2009) for a review and Polzin (2010) for a specific example].”