Transport of 137Cs to the Southern Hemisphere in an ocean general circulation model

Abstract

137Cs originating from global fallout is transported into the ocean interior by advection and diffusion, and the 137Cs concentration is reduced by radioactive decay. 137Cs concentrations in the global ocean can be simulated by global integration of the coarse-resolution Parallel Ocean Program to understand the mechanism of material transport in the ocean. We investigated the transport mechanism of 137Cs to the Southern Hemisphere using an ocean general circulation model (OGCM) and compared the simulated results with observations of 137Cs concentrations in the Southern Hemisphere. 137Cs was deposited on the ocean surface mainly as global fallout originating from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing since 1945, and the global distribution of cumulative 137Cs deposition has been reconstructed from global measurements of 137Cs in rain, seawater, and soil. We estimated the global distribution of 137Cs deposition from 1945 to 2003 using these distribution data, 137Cs deposition data observed at the Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan, from 1958 to 2003, and 137Cs deposition data for 1945–1957 estimated from ice-core data. We compared the simulated results with 137Cs sections from the South Pacific, Indian, and South Atlantic Oceans obtained during the BEAGLE2003 cruise in 2003. The simulated 137Cs sections were in good agreement with the observations, except for the effects of mesoscale eddies, which not be simulated by the model because of its coarse resolution. OGCMs can simulate the general pattern of 137Cs distribution in the world’s oceans and improve our understanding of the transport mechanism leading to those 137Cs distributions on a time scale of several decades. The model simulation results suggest that the 137Cs deposited in the North Pacific advected to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, and then to the South Atlantic over about four decades. The North Pacific is thus an important source area of 137Cs to the Southern Hemisphere.