Chaos in Ocean Ventilation

Ventilation of the subtropical ocean is important for setting the ocean stratification, the oceanic cycling of biogeochemical elements and the storage of carbon dioxide and heat on inter-annual to decadal timescales. In the textbook view, subtropical ocean ventilation is achieved through advection by the time-mean gyre circulation, with fluid parcels moving along sloping density surfaces into the ocean interior. At the same time, it is well accepted that the ocean circulation is highly nonlinear, with the kinetic energy budget dominated by mesoscale eddies. Consequently, ventilated fluid parcels, rather than remaining coherent as they move into the ocean interior, will be rapidly strained and stirred into surrounding water. To investigate the role of this nonlinear circulation in the ventilation process, we calculate a non-dimensional ‘filamentation number’ - the ratio of the Lagrangian ventilation timescale and the timescale of strain by the nonlinear flow - across two density surfaces in the subtropical North Atlantic in an ocean circulation model. This number predicts the filament width of a ventilated fluid parcel, and is found to be large across both density surfaces (indicating small filament width), particularly on the deeper surface. A Lagrangian mapping from distributions of particles to the year in which they were ventilated is thus shown to be highly chaotic, with particles located side-by-side having been ventilated decades apart, even where the density surface is close to the ocean surface. This novel Lagrangian approach avoids the loss of information through diffusion, and emphasises the importance of mesoscale eddies in the ventilation of the subtropical ocean.