[ecco-support] Patchiness in salt advection diagnostics

[Wenrui Jiang]

Hi,

Thanks for reading this email. This question is about the salt advective fluxes in ECCO diagnostics. The out-of-the-box monthly mean vertical salt advection looks something like this.
[cid:c7819ed9-cded-479d-80de-5d48214f5e08]

You can clearly see the lines and patches here as well as in the daily mean diagnostics. However, WVELMASS looks really smooth. I also don't see similar patchiness in other MITgcm output at hand.

My question is maybe kind of silly: why is the diagnostic field so patchy?

I am doing a Lagrangian-budget hybrid study. One of the steps is to emulate the salt fluxed using U and S alone. I came across this problem when I was comparing ADVx_SLT with U*S*dy*dz (I also tried to estimate the flux with daily mean U and S using the DST3method). I realized that their difference is large, looks patchy, and is not quite correlated with du/dx or dv/dy. I would be happy to share my other attempts to understand it.

P.S. I can close the budget with the patchy diagnostic because advective fluxes in all 3 dimensions are patchy and they sort of cancel each other out.

Wenrui Jiang

Ph.D. Student,
Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences,
Johns Hopkins University.

Email: wjiang33 at jh.edu

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