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Chapter 1: Physical Processes
Published in Gunnar Kullenberg, Pollutant Transfer and Transport in the Sea, 1982
Gunnar Kullenberg, Gunnar Kullenberg
Another important mediterranean sea is the Caribbean Sea situated in the trade wind belt. This area is also divided into a series of basins from east to west, and it is connected to the open Atlantic Ocean through a series of narrow passages. Most of these have small sill depths but some have sill depths in the range 1400 to 2200 m. In the top 1500 m the flow in the Caribbean is generally westward, with seasonal variations due to variations of the trade wind. The most well-developed current appears to be the zonal Caribbean Current flowing about 200 km north of the South American coast, turning northward in the western part and flowing out through the Yucatan Strait. Along the coast of Venezuela and Columbia the easterly winds generate coastal up- welling from about 200 m, leading to high primary production and important fishing. Below about 1500 m the circulation in the Caribbean is very weak due to the isolation of these water masses from the open Atlantic Ocean.
Comparative analysis of the performance of the GOFS, PSY4 and AMSEAS ocean model frameworks in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico coastal ocean
Published in Journal of Operational Oceanography, 2022
Sonaljit Mukherjee, Sennai Habtes, Paul Jobsis
Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands lie along the northern arc of the Antilles islands, a group of islands bordering the northeastern rim of the Caribbean Sea (Figure 1). The ocean circulation surrounding these islands is largely influenced by the westward inflow of the Atlantic gyre circulation into the Caribbean Sea through the passages between the islands of the lesser Antilles. The Caribbean Current, spanning the southern portion of the Caribbean Sea between latitudes and N, is largely driven by the inflow of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) through the Windward and Leeward island passages (Johns etal. 2002). This inflow of the AMOC forms approximately two-thirds of the net inflow from the Atlantic Ocean into the Caribbean Sea. The remaining one-third of the inflow occurs between the passages of the islands in the Greater Antilles; the Anegada-Jungfern passage complex to the east separating the Virgin Islands from the Lesser Antilles beginning with Anguilla and St. Maarten, and the Mona passage to the west between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (Johns etal. 2002). The Anegada passage facilitates the flow of mid-depth Atlantic water into the Virgin Islands basin, and the Jungfern passage allows the flow of the Atlantic water into the Caribbean Sea (Fratantoni etal. 1997). The strength of the Caribbean current is geostrophically enhanced by the intensification of the north–south density gradient due to the freshwater flux from the Orinoco and Amazon rivers (Chérubin and Richardson 2007). This freshwater plume can move northwestward through the Caribbean Sea at times reaching the southern coastline of St. Croix of the VI, creating turbulent wakes in the offshore region of the northeastern coast of St Croix (Chérubin and Garavelli 2016). The flow along the northern coastline of the Greater Antilles islands has been characterised as a discontinuous eddy field that transports warm water northwestward as it merges with the Florida current (Gunn and Watts 1982). Simulating the complexity of these features is beyond the capability of the currently operational global ocean models due to coarse resolutions. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a downscaled ocean circulation model with a resolution less than 1 km to realistically simulate the small-scale features and their impact on the mesoscale circulation.