Observed regimes of submesoscale dynamics in the Southern Ocean seasonal ice zone
Creators
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1.
University of Washington
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
University of Gothenburg
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4.
University of Cape Town
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5.
University of California, Los Angeles
Abstract
Submesoscale flows, occurring at scales of about 1–10 km, are crucial to the vertical transport of heat and other tracers in the upper ocean. These flows are energized by instabilities that extract potential energy from lateral buoyancy gradients, which are ubiquitous in the seasonal sea ice zone. Process studies have shown that submesoscale flows influence sea ice mechanics and thermodynamics. However, it is necessary to quantify the spatiotemporal distribution of submesoscale fluxes in order to upscale their impact. Here, we utilize hydrographic data from seal-borne sensors to demonstrate that the Southern Ocean seasonal ice zone can be separated into three regimes of submesoscale flux variability, which are associated with distinct dominant drivers. Furthermore, the magnitude and sign of the mean heat fluxes in these regimes differs, which dictates their influence on the upper-ocean heat budget, mixed-layer depth, and sea ice properties.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
C.J.P. received support from a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. S.S. and M.D.d.P. have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe ERC Synergy Grant programme under grant agreement No. 101118693 (WHIRLS). S.S. is also supported by a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship (WAF3582015.0186) and the Swedish Research Council (VR 2019-04400). S.S. and M.D.d.P. have also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under grant agreement No. 821001 (SO-CHIC). A.L.S. was supported by NSF OPP-2220968. G.E.M. was supported by NSF OPP-2220969. A.F.T. was supported by NSF OPP-1644172 and NASA grant 80NSSC21K0916.
Data Availability
The March 8, 2024 version of the MEOP-CTD dataset is available online at: http://meop.net/. The NOAA/NSIDC daily sea ice concentration data is available online at: http://nsidc.org/data/g02202/. The ERA5 reanalysis is available to download at: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/reanalysis-era5-single-levels. Iteration 155 of the Biogeochemical Southern Ocean State Estimate is available at: http://sose.ucsd.edu/.
Code Availability
The code necessary to conduct the analysis in this study is available on Zenodo at (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16919844).
Supplemental Material
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s41467-025-63775-7.pdf
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Additional details
Identifiers
- PMCID
- PMC12462462
- PMID
- 40998851
Funding
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship -
- Fulbright Program
- European Union
- 101118693
- Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
- WAF3582015.0186
- Swedish Research Council
- VR 2019-04400
- European Research Council
- 821001
- National Science Foundation
- OPP-2220968
- National Science Foundation
- OPP-2220969
- National Science Foundation
- OPP-1644172
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC21K0916
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-08-28
- Available
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2025-09-25Published online