Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• BRICKMAN, D

Titel

Heat flux partitioning in open-ocean convection

Ist Teil von

• Journal of physical oceanography, 1995, Vol.25 (11), p.2609-2623

Ort / Verlag

Boston, MA: American Meteorological Society

Erscheinungsjahr

1995

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Cold air blowing out over a warm ocean leads to convection over an isolated region of the ocean basin. This phenomenon, known as open-ocean convection, is often simulated by convective forcing from a circular disk much smaller than the dimension of the domain. An important feature of these simulations is the development of eddies at the edge of the disk that serve to transport heat horizontally. This has sparked interest in the heat-flux characteristics of such a system. This paper deals with the thermodynamic properties of this type of convective flow, using a rotating tank with bottom-mounted hotplate as the experimental apparatus. Experiments are performed, in an initially unstratified fluid, for a set of values of the nondimensional forcing parameter R sub(c) = B super(1/2)/(Hf super(3/2)), where B is the buoyancy flux, H is the fluid depth, and f is the Coriolis parameter. The ratio of the frontal eddy size to the hotplate radius, epsilon , is shown to be an important parameter.