Extreme wind events responsible for an outsized role in shelf-basin exchange around the southern tip of Greenland.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39536096.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adp9266 and PMC identifier 11559617.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The coastal circulation around Southern Greenland transports fresh, buoyant water masses from the Arctic and Greenland Ice Sheet near regions of convection, sinking, and deep-water formation in the Irminger and Labrador Seas. Here, we track the pathways and fate of these fresh water masses by initializing synthetic particles in the East Greenland Coastal Current on the Southeast Greenland shelf and running them through altimetry-derived surface currents from 1993 to 2021. We report that the majority of waters (83%) remain on the shelf around the southern tip of Greenland. Variability in the shelf-basin exchange of the remaining particles closely follows the number of tip jet wind events on seasonal and interannual timescales. The probability of a particle exiting the shelf increases almost fivefold during a tip jet event. These results indicate that the number of tip jets is a close proxy of the shelf-basin exchange around Southern Greenland.