Internal tides and baroclinicity in the southern Weddell Sea: 1. Model description

Abstract

Near the continental shelf break in the southern Weddell Sea, Warm Deep Water and Western Shelf Water meet. Mixing mechanisms, such as internal tides, have the potential to mix these water masses and form Antarctic Bottom Water. A modified version of the Princeton Ocean Model was utilized to investigate the internal tidal fields generated by the interaction of the M2 barotropic tide with topography for transects across the continental shelf and slope in the southern Weddell Sea. Internal tides were generated over the upper continental slope as predicted by linear internal wave theory. Although the essentially two‐dimensional domain resulted in differences between the model elevations and the observations exceeding the observational uncertainties, the cross‐slope velocities agreed well with differences less than the uncertainties for 78% of the existing observations.