Shinichiro Kida

Oceanic fronts and jets around Japan: a review

This article reviews progress in our understanding of oceanic fronts around Japan and their roles in air–sea interaction. Fronts associated with the Kuroshio and its extension, fronts within the area of the Kuroshio-Oyashio confluence, and the subtropical fronts are described with particular emphasis on their structure, variability, and role in air–sea interaction. The discussion also extends to the fronts in the coastal and marginal seas, the Seto Inland Sea and Japan Sea. Studies on oceanic fronts have progressed significantly during the past decade, but many of these studies focus on processes at individual fronts and do not provide a comprehensive view. Hence, one of the goals of this article is to review the oceanic fronts around Japan by describing the processes based on common metrics. These metrics focus primarily on surface properties to obtain insights into air–sea interactions that occur along oceanic fronts. The basic characteristics derived for each front (i.e., metrics) are then presented as a table. We envision that many of the coupled ocean-atmosphere global circulation models in the coming decade will represent oceanic fronts reasonably well, and it is hoped that this review along with the table of metrics will provide a useful benchmark for evaluating these models.

Potential impact of the tropical Indian Ocean-Indonesian seas on El Niño characteristics.

Diagnostics performed with twentieth-century (1861-2000) ensemble integrations of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Climate Model, version 2.1 (CM2.1) suggest that, during the developing phase, El Nino events that co-occur with the Indian Ocean Dipole Zonal Mode (IODZM; class 1) are stronger than those without (class 2). Also, during class 1 events coherent sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies develop in the Indonesian seas that closely follow the life cycle of IODZM. This study investigates the effect of these regional SST anomalies (equatorial Indian Ocean and Indonesian seas) on the amplitude of the developing El Nino. An examination of class 1 minus class 2 composites suggests two conditions that could lead to a strong El Nino in class 1 events: (i) during January, ocean-atmosphere conditions internal to the equatorial Pacific are favorable for the development of a stronger El Nino and (ii) during May-June, coinciding with the development of regional SST anomalies, an abrupt increase in westerly wind anomalies is noticeable over the equatorial western Pacific with a subsequent increase in thermocline and SST anomalies over the eastern equatorial Pacific. This paper posits the hypothesis that, under favorable conditions in the equatorial Pacific, regional SST anomalies may enable the development of a stronger El Nino. Owing to a wealth of feedbacks in CM2.1, solutions from a linear atmosphere model forced with May-June anomalous precipitation and anomalous SST from selected areas over the equatorial Indo-Pacific are examined. Consistent with our earlier study, the net Kelvin wave response to contrasting tropical Indian Ocean heating anomalies cancels over the equatorial western Pacific. In contrast, Indonesian seas SST anomalies account for about 60%-80% of the westerly wind anomalies over the equatorial western Pacific and also induce anomalous precipitation over the equatorial central Pacific. It is argued that the feedback between the precipitation and circulation anomalies results in an abrupt increase in zonal wind anomalies over the equatorial western Pacific. Encouraged by these results, the authors further examined the processes that cause cold SST anomalies over the Indonesian seas using an ocean model. Sensitivity experiments suggest that local wind anomalies, through stronger surface heat loss and evaporation, and subsurface upwelling are the primary causes. The present results imply that in coupled models, a proper representation of regional air-sea interactions over the equatorial Indo-Pacific warm pool may be important to understand and predict the amplitude of El Nino.

The impact of open oceanic processes on the Antarctic Bottom Water outflows

AbstractThe impact of open oceanic processes on the Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) outflows is investigated using a numerical model with a focus on outflows that occur through deep channels. A major branch of the AABW outflow is known to occur as an overflow from the Filchner Depression to the Weddell Sea through a deep channel a few hundred kilometers wide and a sill roughly 500 m deep. When this overflow enters the Weddell Sea, it encounters the Antarctic Slope Front (ASF) at the shelf break, a density front commonly found along the Antarctic continental shelf break. The presence of an AABW outflow and the ASF create a v-shaped isopycnal structure across the shelf break, indicating an interaction between the overflow and oceanic processes. Model experiments show the overflow transport to increase significantly when an oceanic wind stress increases the depth of the ASF. This enhancement of overflow transport occurs because the channel walls allow a pressure gradient in the along-slope direction to exist a...

Wind- versus Eddy-Forced Regional Sea Level Trends and Variability in the North Pacific Ocean

AbstractRegional sea level trend and variability in the Pacific Ocean have often been considered to be induced by low-frequency surface wind changes. This study demonstrates that significant sea level trend and variability can also be generated by eddy momentum flux forcing due to time-varying instability of the background oceanic circulation. Compared to the broad gyre-scale wind-forced variability, the eddy-forced sea level changes tend to have subgyre scales and, in the North Pacific Ocean, they are largely confined to the Kuroshio Extension region (30°–40°N, 140°–175°E) and the Subtropical Countercurrent (STCC) region (18°–28°N, 130°–175°E). Using a two-layer primitive equation model driven by the ECMWF wind stress data and the eddy momentum fluxes specified by the AVISO sea surface height anomaly data, the relative importance of the wind- and eddy-forced regional sea level trends in the past two decades is quantified. It is found that the increasing (decreasing) trend south (north) of the Kuroshio Ex...

The Annual Cycle of the Japan Sea Throughflow

AbstractThe mechanism responsible for the annual cycle of the flow through the straits of the Japan Sea is investigated using a two-layer model. Observations show maximum throughflow from summer to fall and minimum in winter, occurring synchronously at the three major straits: Tsushima, Tsugaru, and Soya Straits. This study finds the subpolar winds located to the north of Japan as the leading forcing agent, which first affects the Soya Strait rather than the Tsushima or Tsugaru Straits. The subpolar winds generate baroclinic Kelvin waves along the coastlines of the subpolar gyre, affect the sea surface height at the Soya Strait, and modify the flow through the strait. This causes barotropic adjustment to occur inside the Japan Sea and thus affect the flow at the Tsugaru and Tsushima Straits almost synchronously. The barotropic adjustment mechanism explains well why the observations show a similar annual cycle at the three straits. The annual cycle at the Tsugaru Strait is further shown to be weaker than t...

A layered model approach for simulating high river discharge events from land to the ocean

This study presents a new approach for simulating surface runoff, river flow, and oceanic flow. Hydrological-ocean coupled models often stitch the two models at the river mouth because they typically differ in formulation, dynamically and dimensionally. An isopycnal-layered model is shown to naturally couple hydrological and oceanic processes seamlessly with the use of a single dynamical core. Numerical experiments show the high discharge event of the Abukuma River in Japan during Typhoon Roke with realistic river flows and freshwater plumes in the ocean. The time series of the river discharge rates also match well with observations from upstream to downstream.

A Lagrangian View of Spring Phytoplankton Blooms

The mechanisms of spring phytoplankton blooms are investigated from a Lagrangian framework by using a Lagrangian NPZD model that can track the movement and transfers of nutrient parcels in a turbulent environment. The model reveals that the onset of spring blooms depends on the cumulative euphotic age, which is the total time that inorganic nutrient is exposed to light before the photosynthetic conversion to phytoplankton biomass. A spring bloom, defined as a 10-fold increase of near-surface phytoplankton, occurs when this cumulative euphotic age is approximately μeff‐1·ln⁡10, where μeff is the effective growth rate in the euphotic layer, regardless of the underlying mechanism. If the turbulent layer depth is shallower than the critical depth and turbulence is strong, nutrient parcels accumulate enough light exposure through multiple entries to the sun-lit zone near the surface. If turbulence is weak, as that considered in the critical turbulence theory, the accumulation of the light exposure depends on the residence time of the nutrients parcels near the surface. The spectral shape of the cumulative euphotic age can clearly distinguish these two modes of spring blooms. The spectrum shows a peak at the theoretical growth timescale when multiple entries become important, while it shows a maximum near age zero that decays with age when the near-surface residence time becomes important. Mortality increases the cumulative euphotic age necessary for a bloom but does not affect the spectral shape, suggesting that it does not alter the primary mechanism behind the accumulation of cumulative euphotic age.

Abstract: Visualization for High-Resolution Ocean General Circulation Model via Multi-dimensional Transfer Function and Multivariate Analysis

Ocean currents and vortices play an important role in transferring heat, salt or carbon as well as atmospheric circulation. With advances in supercomputing technology, high-resolution large-scale simulation study has been focused in the field of ocean science. However, it is difficult to intuitively understand characteristic features defined as multivariable hiding in the high-resolution dataset. In order to obtain scientific knowledge from large-scale simulation data, it is important to effectively extract and to efficiently express the characteristic feature. The aim of this study is how to efficiently extract and how to effectively visualize ocean currents which affect the heat transportation. In this research, new multi-dimensional transfer function to emphasis the ocean currents and vortices is proposed. Furthermore, multivariate analyses to extract such features are developed. This presentation describes the methodologies and experimental results of these methods. Evaluation of visualization results and feedback to the parameter optimization will be also reported.

High performance computing of MSSG with ultra high resolution

Multi-Scale Simulator for the Geoenvironment (MSSG), which is a coupled non-hydrostatic atmosphere-ocean-land model, has been developed in the Earth simulator Center. Outline of MSSG is introduced and its characteristics are presented. In MSSG, Yin-Yang grid system is adopted in order to relax Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition on the sphere. Furthermore, the Large-Eddy Simulation model for the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer and cloud micro physics model have been adapted for ultra high resolution simulations of weather/climate system. MSSG was optimized computationally on the Earth Simulator and its dynamical core processes had attained 51.5 Tflops on the Earth Simulator. Results from preliminary validations including forecasting experiments are presented.