Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TERIFIC (Targeted Experiment to Reconcile Increased Freshwater with Increased Convection)
Période du rapport: 2021-05-01 au 2022-06-30
The two key gaps in our understanding are: how freshwater reaches the regions of deep convection, and the relative importance of freshwater to convection and restratification. Numerical simulations give conflicting results on freshwater pathways, and convective parameterisations neglect small-scale restratifying processes. Traditional observational approaches cannot capture the spatial and temporal variability of these processes without inordinate cost.
TERIFIC addresses these gaps in understanding through new observations, leveraging recent advances in small-scale electronics to deploy large numbers of mini-drifters on the shelves of Greenland, and em- ploying subsurface and surface autonomous platforms to characterise the balance of processes controlling convection and restratification. The analysis of these observations will answer fundamental questions about how freshwater reaches and affects the regions of deep convection, and enable a critical ground truth of numerical simulations of these processes for climate models.