Abstract
Pacific Water (PW) enters the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait and brings in heat, fresh water, and nutrients from the northern Bering Sea. The circulation of PW in the central Arctic Ocean is only partially understood due to the lack of observations. In this paper, pathways of PW are investigated using simulations with six state‐of‐the art regional and global Ocean General Circulation Models (OGCMs). In the simulations, PW is tracked by a passive tracer, released in Bering Strait. Simulated PW spreads from the Bering Strait region in three major branches. One of them starts in the Barrow Canyon, bringing PW along the continental slope of Alaska into the Canadian Straits and then into Baffin Bay. The second begins in the vicinity of the Herald Canyon and transports PW along the continental slope of the East Siberian Sea into the Transpolar Drift, and then through Fram Strait and the Greenland Sea. The third branch begins near the Herald Shoal and the central Chukchi shelf and brings PW into the Beaufort Gyre. In the models, the wind, acting via Ekman pumping, drives the seasonal and interannual variability of PW in the Canadian Basin of the Arctic Ocean. The wind affects the simulated PW pathways by changing the vertical shear of the relative vorticity of the ocean flow in the Canada Basin.
Highlights
According to long-term moorings deployed in Bering Strait in 1991, 1998–2011, the annual mean water transport from the northern Bering Sea into the Arctic Ocean through the strait varies from year to year and is $0.7–1.1 Sv or $22–35 3 103 km3 a21 (1 Sv 5 106 m3 s21 5 31,536 km3 a21) [Woodgate et al, 2012]
The UNESCO [1986] practical salinity unit scale (PSU) convention is used through the text to be consistent with the historical observational freshwater fluxes in Bering Strait and the observed Arctic liquid freshwater content [e.g., Woodgate et al, 2006; Rabe et al, 2011, 2014] and with the UNESCO equation of state featured in the models participating in this study
We focused on the dynamics of the Pacific layer in the Arctic Ocean in the models
Summary
According to long-term moorings deployed in Bering Strait in 1991, 1998–2011, the annual mean water transport from the northern Bering Sea into the Arctic Ocean through the strait varies from year to year and is $0.7–1.1 Sv or $22–35 3 103 km a21 (1 Sv 5 106 m3 s21 5 31,536 km a21) [Woodgate et al, 2012]. This inflow brings Pacific Water (PW) to the Arctic Ocean, supplying the ocean with $2030–3500 km a21 of fresh water, referenced to a salinity of 34.8 [Woodgate et al, 2006, 2012]. A recent comprehensive overview of PW pathways is given by Timmermans et al [2014], with the focus on the summer mode waters of the Pacific inflow, the lighter Alaskan Coastal Water (ACW) and denser summer
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