A CD-ROM available with animations from the Active River Tracer Model
Experiment
An experiment has been designed to study the fresh water budget of the
Arctic Ocean using a high resolution coupled ice/ocean model. The main
issues to be addressed are the fresh water circulation on the shelves and
communication with the deep ocean and different aspects of Siberian versus
North American runoff, Pacific versus Atlantic inflow, and outflow through
Fram Strait versus the Canadian Archipelago.
In this experiment each river source has a prescribed realistic annual
cycle of daily mean fluxes of heat and salt as a function of daily mean
volume flux. Each river source contributes to the ocean density fields and
can be traced as a separate 'active' tracer throughout the Arctic Ocean.
The model uses 1990 to 1994 realistic, high frequency atmospheric forcing
from ECMWF (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts). The
animations cover a 40 year simulation. Each time step in the movie covers a
period of one month.
The sequences included on the CD-ROM show the river discharge in the top 20
m of the Arctic Ocean and then in the layer from 45 to 70 m and from 100 to
140 m. The total tracer sequences show the combined efffect from 10 sources
(8 russian rivers, the Mackenzie in Canada, and Bering Strait). The sources
are also shown individually. Regional animations of the combined fresh
water outflow through the Canadian Archipelago, Fram Strait and the
Greenland Sea, and the Labrador and Irminger Seas are also shown.
The results presented within this CD-ROM have been obtained in
collaboration between a group at the Naval Postgraduate School (Wieslaw
Maslowski, Yuxia Zhang, Albert Semtner) and Bob Newton and Peter Schlosser
at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University. Funding for this
project has been provided by grants from NSF/ARCSS, DOE/CHAMMP, and Cray
Research Inc./UAF. Computer resources were obtained from the Arctic Region
Supercomputing Center of the University of Alaska.
For more information about the model, model output, or other animations
please check the following website:
http://vislab-www.nps.navy.mil/~braccio/maslowski/arctic.html
If you are interested in obtaining a free copy of the CD-ROM, please contact:
Wieslaw Maslowski
maslowsk [at] ucar.edu
Oceanography Department
Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, CA 93943
Tel: (408) 656-3162