Aviv Solodoch

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS)

The East Mediterranean Sea (EMS) circulation has previously been characterized as dominated by gyres, mesoscale eddies, and disjoint boundary currents. We develop nested high-resolution numerical simulations in the EMS to examine the circulation variability with an emphasis on the yet unexplored regional submesoscale currents. Rather than several d...

The oceanic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) plays a key role in the climate system, and monitoring its evolution is a scientific priority. Monitoring arrays have been established at several latitudes in the Atlantic Ocean, but other latitudes and oceans remain unmonitored for logistical reasons. This study explores the possibility of infer...

It is now well established that changes in the zonal wind stress over the ACC do not lead to changes in its baroclinicity nor baroclinic transport, a phenomenon referred to as “eddy saturation”. Previous studies provide contrasting dynamical mechanisms for this phenomenon: on one extreme, changes in the winds lead to changes the efficiency with whi...

Plain Language Summary Cooling, ice formation, and mixing near Antarctica create dense ocean waters, known as Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW). Due to their high density, these waters sink and propagate northward to fill the deepest parts of the Southern, Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans. Hence AABW export has a significant and near‐global impact...

Plain Language Summary Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) is the densest major body of water in the world ocean, flowing out from Antarctica and filling over one‐third of the global subsurface. AABW has several key functions in the climate system, particularly for climate variability over centuries to millennia. However, current observing and simulation...

Previous studies have concluded that the wind-input vorticity in ocean gyres is balanced by bottom pressure torques (BPT), when integrated over latitude bands. However, the BPT must vanish when integrated over any area enclosed by an isobath. This constraint raises ambiguities regarding the regions over which BPT should close the vorticity budget,...

Long-lived anticyclonic eddies (ACs) have been repeatedly observed over several North Atlantic basins characterized by bowl-like topographic depressions. Motivated by these previous findings, the authors conduct numerical simulations of the spin-down of eddies initialized in idealized topographic bowls. In experiments with 1 or 2 isopycnal layers,...

The southward flowing deep limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is comprised of both the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) and interior pathways. The latter are fed by “leakiness” from the DWBC in the Newfoundland Basin. However, the cause of this leakiness has not yet been explored mechanistically. Here the statistics and dyn...

We present in-situ and remote observations of a Mississippi plume front in the Louisiana bight. The plume propagated freely across the bight, rather than as a coastal current. The observed cross-front circulation pattern is typical of density currents, as are the small width (≈ 100 m) of the plume front, and the presence of surface frontal converge...

Observations and models of deep ocean boundary currents show that they exhibit complex variability, instabilities and eddy shedding, particularly over continental slopes that curve horizontally, for example around coastal peninsulas. In this article the authors investigate the source of this variability by characterizing the properties of baroclini...

A mechanism is presented, based on multiscale interactions via nonlinear wind-induced surface heat exchange (WISHE), that produces eastward-propagating, intraseasonal convective anomalies in the tropical atmosphere. Simulations of convectively coupled disturbances are presented in two intermediate-complexity atmospheric models. One is a shallow wat...

The intraseasonal Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) involves a slow eastward-propagating signal in the tropical atmosphere which significantly influences climate yet is not well understood despite significant theoretical and observational progress. We study the atmosphere's response to nonlinear "Wind Induced Surface Heat Exchange" (WISHE) forcing in...