Global ocean circulation, water-mass transformation, and mixing

Abstract: 

In this talk I will take the opportunity to introduce myself and my work to the School of Mathematics and Statistics. Therefore, this talk will be a general overview of my work, with some in-depth parts.

Most of my work is related to the study of density changes, or `water mass transformation'. Changing ocean inventories of heat and tracers such as carbon are central to climate change. As the ocean is vertically layered in density, the surface to interior pathways of tracers depend on density changes, in order to penetrate through those layers. Water mass transformation is therefore essential to understand and quantify the tracer pathways in the ocean.

We will explore different uses of water mass transformation (WMT). For example, we will look at WMT caused by nonlinearities of the equation of state, that prove to be a dominant source of Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW) formation. A component of my research has been to express WMT by means of streamfunctions in different (abstract) coordinates such as in (Salinity, Temperature)–coordinates and (Anthropogenic Carbon, Density)–coordinates. Each such coordinate combination reveals different insights into tracer and ocean circulation. The WMT framework is also used to construct new types of inverse methods that utilizes the increasing data coverage through ARGO, and are specifically designed to estimate ocean mixing parameters, from now readily available climatologies of temperature and salinity.