The role of surface forcing in driving pathways and time scales of ocean ventilation in the subpolar North Atlantic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ocean takes up 93 % of the excess heat in the climate system and approximately a quarter of the anthropogenic carbon via air–sea fluxes. Ocean ventilation and subduction are key processes that regulate the transport of water from the surface mixed layer to the ocean's interior, which is isolated from the atmosphere for a timescale set by the large-scale circulation. Using numerical simulations (NEMO framework), we assess where the ocean subducts water and takes up properties from the atmosphere, and how ocean currents transport and redistribute these properties. This is achieved by adding a set of simulated seawater vintage dyes (passive tracers) that are released annually from different ocean surface “patches”, representing water masses’ source regions. The dyes’ distribution captures years of strong and weak convection at deep and mode water formation sites in both hemispheres, showing good agreement with observations in the subpolar North Atlantic. We show that interannual variability in subduction rates, driven by changes in surface forcing, is key in setting the different sizes of the long-term inventory of the dyes. The Northern and Southern Hemispheres are characterised by different ventilation pathways and timescales, but our analysis highlights a strong correlation between the strength of ventilation in recently subducted waters and the longer-term dye inventory in each hemisphere. This means that the conditions close to the time of dye injection are driving the amount of seawater being subducted, but also that this signal persists over time and the longer-term tracer inventory is strongly related to the initial surface conditions. The correlation still holds for the different source regions, where it is even stronger, but the slope of the correlation does vary. Export and isolation of subducted waters is shown to be faster in the Northern Hemisphere, defining a stronger ventilation “persistence” – represented by the slope of the correlation between subduction and the longer-term inventory. The highest ventilation persistence is found in the subpolar North Atlantic and specifically in the Labrador and Irminger Seas, which are the dominant regions in retaining tracer on multi-decadal time scales.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".