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Antarctic Circumpolar Current Dynamics

The Antarctic Circumplar Current flows around the continent of Antarctica in a clockwise fashion, as the most 'atmosphere'-like ocean current. This leads to unique dynamics, including standing meanders and eddy activity hot spots at undersea ridges. The dynamics here also drive localized air-sea carbon fluxes and focus the global overturning circulation, creating pathways of heat and carbon from the surface to the global deep ocean.

Coastal Antarctic Circulation

The Antarctic margins are home to many ice shelves, where land ice touches the ocean. The coastal ocean circulation around Antarctica transfers heat to these ice shelves, leading to melt. If the ice shelf melt increases leading to a collapes of land-based ice sheets, this would be responsible for a considerable amount of sea level rise globally. In my group we study this circulation and how the melt feeds back on the circulation, i.e. how much melt will happen under climate change and how quickly these ice shelves will melt.

Global Overturning Circulation

The global overturning circulation is the way the ocean exchanges water around the globe, with sinking of cold, dense water in the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, and upwelling in the Southern Ocean. This moves heat, nuturients, and gasses around the globe and impacts climate on decadal to millenial time scales. In our group we study the physics of this overturning circulation by identifiying tipping points in the circulation and simplifying the physics to simple scaling laws.

Mesoscale Turbulence

Mesoscale turbulence in the ocean is characterized by baroclinic and barotropic eddies. This class of turbulence is important for setting the mean state of the ocean and atmosphere, however we aren't able to predict the characteristics of the flow without being fully able to resolve it. In my group we investigate this fundamental problem in geophysical fluid dynamics to better model and understand atmospheric and oceanic dynamics.

Contact

Email: myoungs@umd.edu

Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park