Scholarlink

<p>Oceanic mesoscale eddies with scales of <i>O</i> (10–100) km notably impact meridional heat transport, which profoundly modulates the Earth’s climate system. It is well known that eddy-induced meridional heat transport (EHT) can be caused by both the stirring and trapping effects of mesoscale eddies, but their relative contributions remain controversial. Previous studies that employed solely Eulerian methods to quantify the two types of EHT introduced systematic biases due to neglecting potential tracer leakage of mesoscale eddy. To address this, the study combines Eulerian and Lagrangian methods to more accurately quantify these two types of EHT at the surface. We find that both eddy stirring- and trapping-induced EHTs are dominantly poleward with large values occurring in subtropical frontal regions. Stirring-induced surface EHT is 1–2 orders of magnitude larger than trapping-induced EHT throughout most of the global ocean, which also holds when considering the full water column. In addition, the trapping effect also substantially contributes to the EHT in a few ocean areas, such as southwest of Australia and the Mozambique Channel. The above results demonstrate that the horizontal stirring effect of mesoscale eddies is the dominant mechanism of EHT throughout most of the global ocean, which enhances our understanding of meridional heat transport in the ocean.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Stirring by mesoscale eddies dominates meridional eddy heat transport in global ocean

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年8月21日

查看全文
  • Qingguo Yuan,
  • Zhiwei Zhang,
  • Tongya Liu,
  • Wei Zhao,
  • Jiwei Tian

摘要

Oceanic mesoscale eddies with scales of O (10–100) km notably impact meridional heat transport, which profoundly modulates the Earth’s climate system. It is well known that eddy-induced meridional heat transport (EHT) can be caused by both the stirring and trapping effects of mesoscale eddies, but their relative contributions remain controversial. Previous studies that employed solely Eulerian methods to quantify the two types of EHT introduced systematic biases due to neglecting potential tracer leakage of mesoscale eddy. To address this, the study combines Eulerian and Lagrangian methods to more accurately quantify these two types of EHT at the surface. We find that both eddy stirring- and trapping-induced EHTs are dominantly poleward with large values occurring in subtropical frontal regions. Stirring-induced surface EHT is 1–2 orders of magnitude larger than trapping-induced EHT throughout most of the global ocean, which also holds when considering the full water column. In addition, the trapping effect also substantially contributes to the EHT in a few ocean areas, such as southwest of Australia and the Mozambique Channel. The above results demonstrate that the horizontal stirring effect of mesoscale eddies is the dominant mechanism of EHT throughout most of the global ocean, which enhances our understanding of meridional heat transport in the ocean.