RAPID - Round 1 - Circulation, overflow, and deep convection studies in the Nordic Seas using tracers and models Project

Introduction

We will investigate two aspects of the Nordic Seas circulation of importance to the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC): (1) Sources of water in the Greenland-Scotland overflows: recent tracer release and transient tracer observations will be used to constrain inverse models of the sources of Denmark Straits and Faroe-Bank channel overflow waters. (2) The initiation of convection and its relation to submesoscale hydrodynamics: very high-resolution non-hydrostatic models for the Central Greenland Sea will be used to model recent observations, which show convection to be intimately related to local sub-mesoscale structure.: The objective will be to develop improved descriptions of convection for use in OGCMs, to more accurately describe how the sinking branch of the MOC will be affected by changes in forcing.

Project Duration: 1 Aug 2003 - 31 Oct 2006

This project is funded by NERC - Grant Ref. NER/T/S/2002/00446 - through the RAPID Climate Change NERC directed mode programme.

Availability of data

The modelling project will involve existing data from a variety of sources, including TRACTOR, ESOP2, and ARCICE, for which the PI possesses the SF6 data.

There will be inverse, box model and high resolution model output. Provisionally, the dimensions of the high resolution are ~200 km² at a horizontal resolution of 1 km, with approximately 40 levels in the vertical. Typically, there will be 6-10 parameters. At this stage, the intention is to run the model for two years. Most likely, one will be the -ve NAO year of 1996, for which the PI has data on convection and the other will be for a +ve NAO year. The boundary conditions will be supplied by the Norwegian Nansen Institute. The output (tracer distribution) from the inverse/adjunct methods is likely to be compared with OCCAM (or equivalent) and it was suggested that some form of visualisation of the resulting comparisons might also be stored. Model output is expected to be available in years 2 and 3 of the project.

Access to data and information

Data and software supplied from this project to the BADC will be stored in the BADC RAPID archive.

Access to the archive is currently restricted to participants to this particular project. If you are a programme participant and would like to access this RAPID project data, then please apply for access^* to the RAPID data.

You will be requested to abide by the RAPID Climate Change Data Policy.
Data management, availability and use are ruled by the RAPID Climate Change Programme Data Management Plan (PDF document).
Access to Hadley Centre model data held at the BADC is subject to the signature of the NERC-Met Office agreement.

^* Note that to apply for access to this dataset, you should first register as a BADC user (anyone is allowed to register). If you are already a registered BADC user, skip this step. If you have forgotten your BADC user ID and/or password, please contact the BADC helpdesk at badc@rl.ac.uk. To register as a new BADC user, please follow the instructions online.

Citation

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Date of citation

Who to contact

This RAPID project is led by Prof Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia, also with co-investigators at the University of East Anglia.

General queries about these pages or browsing the data should be directed to the BADC support line.

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