Eurasian rivers provide a quarter of total fresh water to the Arctic, maintaining a persistent fresh layer that covers the surface Arctic Ocean. This freshwater export controls Arctic Ocean stratification, circulation, and basin-wide sea ice concentration. The Lena River supplies the largest volume of runoff and plays a key role in this system, as runoff outflows into the Laptev Sea as a particularly shallow plume. Previous in...

From generating metrics representative of a wide region to saving costs by reducing the density of an observational network, the reasons to split the ocean into distinct regions are many. Traditionally, this has been done somewhat arbitrarily using the bathymetry and potentially some artificial latitude–longitude boundaries. We use an ensemble of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs, unsupervised classification) to separate the compl...

The subpolar North Atlantic is an important part of the global ocean and climate system, with SST variability in the region influencing the climate of Europe and North America. While the majority of the global ocean exhibited higher than average surface temperatures in 2015, the subpolar North Atlantic experienced record low temperatures. This interannual cold anomaly is thought to have been driven by surface forcing, but deta...

Oceanographic fronts are transitions between thermohaline structures with different characteristics. Such transitions are ubiquitous, and their locations and properties affect how the ocean operates as part of the global climate system. In the Southern Ocean, fronts have classically been defined using a small number of continuous, circumpolar features in sea surface height or dynamic height. Modern observational and theoretica...

Wintertime convection in the North Atlantic Ocean is a key component of the global climate as it produces dense waters at high latitudes that flow equatorward as part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Recent work has highlighted the dominant role of the Irminger and Iceland basins in the production of North Atlantic Deep Water. Dense water formation in these basins is mainly explained by buoyancy forci...

We consider the estimation of the grazing preferences parameters of zooplankton in ocean ecosystem models with ensemble-based Kalman filters. These parameters are introduced to model the relative diet composition of zooplankton that consists of phytoplankton, small size-classes of zooplankton and detritus. They are positive values and their sum is equal to one. However, the sum-to-one constraint cannot be guaranteed by ensembl...