• Journal of the Korean Geophysical Society
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.291-299
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• 2006

The observed ocean barotropic circulation is not completely explained by the classical wind-driven circulation theory. Although it is believed that the thermohaline forcing plays a role in the ocean barotropic circulation to some degree, how much the thermohaline forcing contributes to the barotropic circulation is not well known. The role of thermohaline circulation driven by changes in temperature and salinity in the Southern Ocean (SO) water masses on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) transport is investigated using a coupled ocean - atmosphere - sea ice - land surface climate system model in a Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) context. Withthe implementation of glacial boundary conditions in a coupled model, a substantial increase in the ACC transport by about 75% in 80 years of integration and 25% in the near LGM equilibrium is obtained despite of the decreases in the magnitude of wind stresses over the SO by 33% in the transient time and 20% in the near-equilibrium. This result suggests that the increase in the barotropic ACC transport is due to factors other than the wind forcing. The change in ocean thermohaline circulation in the SO seems to play a significant role in enhancing the ACC transport in association with the change in the bottom pressure torque.

• Journal of Climate Change Research
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• v.34 no.12
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• pp.5081-5092
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• 2021

Paleoproxy records indicate that abrupt changes in thermohaline circulation (THC) were induced by rapid meltwater discharge from retreating ice sheets. Such abrupt changes in the THC have been understood as a hysteresis behavior of a nonlinear system. Previous studies, however, primarily focused on a near-static hysteresis under fixed or slowly varying freshwater forcing (FWF), reflecting the equilibrated response of the THC. This study aims to improve the current understanding of transient THC responses under rapidly varying forcing and their dependency on forcing time scales. The results simulated by an Earth system model suggest that the bifurcation is delayed as the forcing time scale is shorter, causing the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation collapse and recovery to occur at higher and lower FWF values, respectively. The delayed shutdown/recovery occurs because bifurcation is determined not by the FWF value at the time but by the total amount of freshwater remaining over the THC convection region. The remaining freshwater amount is primarily determined by the forcing accumulation (i.e., time-integrated FWF), which is modulated by the freshwater/salt advection by ocean circulations and freshwater flux by the atmospheric hydrological cycle. In general, the latter is overwhelmed by the former. When the forced freshwater amount is the same, the modulation effect is stronger under slowly varying forcing because more time is provided for the feedback processes.

• Journal of the korean society of oceanography
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.72-95
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• 2004

The Yellow Sea is characterized by relatively shallow water depth, varying range of tidal action and very complex coastal geometry such as islands, bays, peninsulas, tidal flats, shoals etc. The dynamic system is controlled by tides, regional winds, river discharge, and interaction with the Kuroshio. The circulation, water mass properties and their variability in the Yellow Sea are very complicated and still far from clear understanding. In this study, an effort to improve our understanding the dynamic feature of the Yellow Sea system was conducted using numerical simulation with the ROMS model, applying climatologic forcing such as winds, heat flux and fresh water precipitation. The inter-annual variability of general circulation and thermohaline structure throughout the year has been obtained, which has been compared with observational data sets. The simulated horizontal distribution and vertical cross-sectional structures of temperature and salinity show a good agreement with the observational data indicating significantly the water masses such as Yellow Sea Warm Water, Yellow Sea Bottom Cold Water, Changjiang River Diluted Water and other sporadically observed coastal waters around the Yellow Sea. The tidal effects on circulation and dynamic features such as coastal tidal fronts and coastal mixing are predominant in the Yellow Sea. Hence the tidal effects on those dynamic features are dealt in the accompanying paper (Kim et at., 2004). The ROMS model adopts curvilinear grid with horizontal resolution of 35 km and 20 vertical grid spacing confirming to relatively realistic bottom topography. The model was initialized with the LEVITUS climatologic data and forced by the monthly mean air-sea fluxes of momentum, heat and fresh water derived from COADS. On the open boundaries, climatological temperature and salinity are nudged every 20 days for data assimilation to stabilize the modeling implementation. This study demonstrates a Yellow Sea version of Atlantic Basin experiment conducted by Haidvogel et al. (2000) experiment that the ROMS simulates the dynamic variability of temperature, salinity, and velocity fields in the ocean. However the present study has been improved to deal with the large river system, open boundary nudging process and further with combination of the tidal forcing that is a significant feature in the Yellow Sea.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.245-258
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• 2006

We investigated seasonal variations of the upper ocean temperature and the mixed layer depth (MLD) in an eddy-permitting global ocean general circulation model (OGCM) to assess the OGCM perfermance. The OGCM is based on the GFDL MOM3 which has a horizontal resolution of 0.5 degree and 30 vertical levels. The OGCM was integrated for 68 years using a monthly-mean climatological wind stress forcing. The model sea surface temperature (SST) and sea surface salinity were restored to the Levitus climatology with a time scale of 30 days. Annual-mean model SST shows a cold bias $(<\;-2^{\circ}C)$ in the summer hemisphere and a warm bias $(>\;1^{\circ}C)$ in the winter hemisphere mainly due to the restoring boundary condition of temperature. The model MLD captures well the observed features in most areas, with a slightly deep bias. However, in the Ross Sea and Weddell Sea, the model shows significantly deeper MLD than the climatology-mainly due to weak salinity stratifications in the model. For amplitude of seasonal variation, the model SST is smaller $(1{\sim}3^{\circ}C)$ than the observation largely due to the restoring surface boundary condition while the model MLD has larger seasonal variation $({\sim}50m)$. It is suggested that for more realistic simulation of the upper ocean structure in the present eddy-permitting ocean model, more refinements in the surface boundary condition for the thermohaline forcing and parameterization for vertical mixing are required, together with the incorporation of a sea-ice model.