CLEX researchers used a state-of-the-art global ocean-sea-ice model to directly measure the overturning circulation, and through this to examine the relationship between the Ekman Streamfunction and the Southern Ocean overturning circulation.
In this study, CLEX researchers used aircraft observations from twenty flights during three Austral winters to study the microphysical and reflective properties of shallow convective clouds over the mid-latitude Southern Ocean.
Major gaps exist in our understanding of the pathways between the generation and the breaking of internal waves in the Southern Ocean. This has important implications for the distribution of internal wave-driven turbulent mixing, for the sensitivity of ocean mixing rates, and for the representation of ocean mixing in numerical models.
The discovery of changing eddy energy was made by a team of ANU and UNSW researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. Their work, published today in Nature Climate Change, shows clear changes to the distribution and strength of these eddies, which had not been previously detected.
Welcome to the first Weather and Climate Interactions RP report. The new program name is simply a result of rationalising CLEX’s continuing research program under new headings that more clearly delineate the focus of the work we do.
CLEX researchers introduced a novel methodology to examine the Southern Ocean's response to changing winds. They performed numerical simulations with a global ocean‐sea ice model suite that spans a hierarchy of spatial resolutions and driven by realistic atmospheric forcing conditions.
This study is based the well-established fact that sea ice cover is very closely related to surface air temperature, so that we can use trends in Antarctic sea ice as an independent validation for the reanalysis trends.
In this paper, the researchers investigated how a major glacier tongue break in the Mertz polynya in Antarctica impacted phytoplankton blooms. Larger phytoplankton blooms increase the amount of carbon that can be stored in the deep ocean.
By grouping weather systems by similar patterns rather than averaging conditions over months, seasons or years, CLEX researchers found that between Australia and Antarctica, the ‘doughnut’ structure of SAM is split into multiple ‘flavours’ and is more likely to have ‘bite marks’ out of it than be a perfect ring.
CLEX researchers used real-world observations with satellite observations to calculate the quantity of nutrients carried into the Subantarctic Zone by mesoscale eddies. They found these eddies carried high nitrate and low silicate waters into the Subantarctic Zone.