Impact of deep ocean mixing on the climatic mean state in the Southern Ocean

Hiroaki Tatebe, Yuki Tanaka, Yoshiki Komuro, Hiroyasu Hasumi

The Southern Ocean is of great importance for the global stratification and biological carbon storage because it is connected to the global ocean conveyor by which atmospheric information absorbed in the Southern Ocean is redistributed globally and buffered over centuries. Therefore, understanding what controls the Southern Ocean climate, the global ocean conveyor, and links between them is a key to quantifying uncertainties in future climate projections. Based on a set of climate model experiments, here we show that the tide-induced micro-scale mixing in the Pacific deep ocean has significant impacts on the wintertime Southern Ocean climate through basin-scale reorganization of ocean stratification and resultant response of the global ocean conveyor. Specifically, Pacific deep water, which is modified by the deep ocean mixing while travelling south, reinforces the subsurface stratification and suppresses deep convection in the Southern Ocean. Resultant increase of the Ross Sea sea-ice leads to decrease of incoming shortwave radiation and strengthening of the westerly and storms. Because the Southern Ocean could regulate the global warming progress through its role as heat and carbon sink, our study implies that better representation of deep ocean mixing in climate models contributes to reliability improvement in regional-to-global climate projections.