Age and residence time of terrestrial source water in the northwest Atlantic shelf seas

Coastal river mouths and bays are the junctions where terrestrial-source water meets and mixes with water from the open ocean. Once the riverine water reaches the coastal ocean, its eventual fate is largely unknown and difficult to trace. Rivers that flow into the ocean may contain high levels of nutrients and organic matter, so understanding the fate of terrestrial source water is important for a variety of biogeochemical processes that occur in the shelf seas. The fate of this terrestrial source water may be described in terms of its mean age (the time since it reached the ocean) and its residence time (the time it remains on the continental shelf).

Using a high-resolution ocean model, we apply the constituent-oriented age and residence time (CART) theory to a large region encompassing the northwest Atlantic shelf seas to calculate the mean age of terrestrial source water and its residence time. For this application, 196 river mouths are used as sources of terrestrial water from South America to Nova Scotia. We investigate the spatial and seasonal variability of the water’s mean age and compute the residence time within four different shelf regions: the Carribean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the South Atlantic Bight, and the Mid-Atlantic Bight/Gulf of Maine. From the estimates of mean age and residence time, we describe the impact of the coastal circulation on the eventual fate of terrestrial waters, and provide conjecture on how varying transport time scales may affect the general biogeochemical processes in the coastal ocean.