Development of method to identify submesoscale disturbances in a wide area and its application to the North Pacific

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26610148
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Meteorology/Physical oceanography/Hydrology
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: Suga Toshio 東北大学, 理学研究科, 教授 (70211977)
• Research Collaborator: ITO Daiki
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: サブメソスケール擾乱 / 中規模渦 / Argoフロート / スパイシネス / 渦度場・歪場 / 3次元カスケード / 高鉛直波数構造 / 船舶集中観測

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Submesoscale disturbances on the scale of several kilometers to several tens of kilometers play an important role in the energy cascade and the material transport in the ocean. As a foundation for investigating the wide-area distribution of submesoscale disturbances, a method to detect submesoscale disturbance by using temperature/salinity intrusion structure from the vertical profile data of Argo profiling float array deployed over the global ocean.
In order to understand the process to form a high vertical wave number structure associated with the development of submesoscale phenomena, unique intensive shipboard observation was carried out in the east coast of Honshu, enabling us to grasp this process directly and in detail. This observation quantitatively and theoretically supported the above identification method.

Free Research Field

海洋物理学