Maintenance and broadening of the ocean’s salinity distribution by the water cycle

Zika, Jan D.; Skliris, Nikolaos; Nurser, A.J. George; Josey, Simon A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1683-8831; Mudryk, Lawrence; Laliberté, Frédéric; Marsh, Robert. 2015 Maintenance and broadening of the ocean’s salinity distribution by the water cycle. Journal of Climate, 28 (24). 9550-9560. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0273.1

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Text © Copyright 2015 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or copyrights@ametsoc.org. jcli-d-15-0273%2E1.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract/Summary

The global water cycle leaves an imprint on ocean salinity through evaporation and precipitation. It has been proposed that observed changes in salinity can be used to infer changes in the water cycle. Here salinity is characterized by the distribution of water masses in salinity coordinates. Only mixing and sources and sinks of freshwater and salt can modify this distribution. Mixing acts to collapse the distribution, making saline waters fresher and fresh waters more saline. Hence, in steady state, there must be net precipitation over fresh waters and net evaporation over saline waters. A simple model is developed to describe the relationship between the breadth of the distribution, the water cycle, and mixing—the latter being characterized by an e-folding time scale. In both observations and a state-of-the-art ocean model, the water cycle maintains a salinity distribution in steady state with a mixing time scale of the order of 50 yr. The same simple model predicts the response of the salinity distribution to a change in the water cycle. This study suggests that observations of changes in ocean salinity could be used to infer changes in the hydrological cycle.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0273.1
ISSN:	0894-8755
Additional Keywords:	Precipitation, Water masses, Climate change, Evaporation, Hydrologic cycle, Salinity
NORA Subject Terms:	Marine Sciences
Date made live:	07 Jan 2016 10:05 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/512601

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