PI: Amy Bower (WHOI) Deep ocean convection is limited to a small
number of isolated regions worldwide, including the Labrador
Sea, but it has a profound impact on the ocean’s thermohaline
circulation and climate. While the convection process itself has
been studied intensively over the last decade, the
restratification of the water column after convection, which
will directly impact convection during subsequent winters, is
not as well-studied. It has recently been suggested that the
decay of coherent, long-lived, anticyclonic eddies shed from a
surrounding warm boundary current are potentially important in
restratifying convection regions. This idea is most developed in
the Labrador Sea, where anticyclonic eddies containing a core of
warm, salty water from the Irminger Current (a remnant of the
Gulf Stream) have been observed. The goal of the proposed
research is to advance our understanding of the role of Irminger
Rings in deep convection by collecting new information on their
initial structure and on the ev