Controlling factors on air-sea CO2 flux

The relationships of air-sea CO2 flux (pCO2 ) and controlling factors. Could we just calculate the correlation coefficients between the CO2 flux (pCO2 ) and some specific factor? Or could we utilize the EOF methods to investigate the correlation between the spatial patterns?

• Ocean uptake of CO2         


• Ocean pCO2         


• Eddy diffusivity. Could we approximately use the global tidal dissipation to express the eddy diffusivity?


• Heat flux         


• Ocean circulation         


• Wind         


• Salinity         


• Water color

Examine the energy sources of ocean mixing by comparing its spatial distribution with results of baroclinic tide models

Could we investigate the energy sources of ocean mixing by comparing the figures of baroclinic tides (Egbert and Ray, 2000) with figures of eddy diffusivity from Kunze et al. (2006). It seems to me that they match each other quite well. Several unmatched hot- spots could be due to other processes, such as wind-generate near-inertial oscillation or lee waves generated by interactions between strong currents or strong eddies with topography.

Use high resolution numerical model to study the sub-grid processes and to test various parameterizations

How to learn eddy diffusivity or effects of sub-grid processes in a numerical model? Could we do that by changing the resolution of the model and then compare the different results?

• Using high-resolution model to calculate the different quantities, such as velocity, temperature and salinity.

• Using low-resolution model with parameterization to calculate same quantities. Then we can compare the results and figure out wether the parameterization model works well.

• We could also figure out the relationships of diffusivity or sub-grid process and the grid size.

Bathymetry Spectra and the possible application on studying the generation of internal lee waves

Goff (1991) showed that the ocean bathymetry has well-behaved horizontal wave- number spectrum. Could this be used to approximate the high-wavenumber component which cannot be resolved with current Smith and Sandwell Data (Smith and Sandwell, 1997)?

St Laurent and Simmons (2006) show a method in the horizontal wave-number space to estimate the internal tides or lee wave generated through the interaction between currents and topography. However, they paid more attention to the internal tides due to the limitation of bathymetry data. Here, Could we benefit from the work mentioned above (Goff, 1991)?

If the answer is Yes, we can estimate the energy of generate lee wave and examine the role it plays in closing the ocean energy budget.

Possible relationships between the intraseasonal oscillation in the deep ocean around EPR and MJO

MJO can induce low frequency oscillation (Kelvin Waves) in the ocean. And these oscillation can propagate eastward. Many features of low frequency (30-60 days) have been found along the western coastal of North and South American. However, comparing to the upper ocean signals, few have been found in the deep ocean. As I am aware, there is only one paper (Matthews et al., 2007) which shows such an oscillation can penetrate downward to a depth of 1500m.

Due to the presence of the East Pacific Rise, if this downward propagating Kelvin wave can reach it, part of the energy will be trapped and propagate along the ridge. This along-ridge propagating waves could be very important for the material transport in a certain time scale (30-60days). Also, these waves could interact with the topography to either generate lee waves or induce overflow, both of which could result in some temporal signals in the mixing events.