North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre

Assembled from 17 blocks · 1 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. The basin-wide clockwise circulation of the North Atlantic, driven by the trade winds on its southern flank and the mid-latitude westerlies on its northern flank. The two wind belts push surface water toward the centre of the basin through Ekman transport; the water piles into a broad mound roughly a metre high and the resulting pressure gradient, balanced against the Coriolis force, sets the gyre turning. Harald Sverdrup showed in 1947 that the interior flow is fixed by the curl of the wind stress rather than by the wind direction. The gyre is slow and broad over most of its area and fast and narrow only on its western edge, where the Gulf Stream runs.
3. Knowledge
4. Ekman Transport and the Ekman Spiral
5. North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre
6. Connections
7. Ekman Transport and the Ekman Spiral
8. Western Intensification of Wind-Driven Gyres
9. Gulf Stream
10. Stommel explains why the fast currents are on the west
11. North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre
12. Coastal and Equatorial Upwelling
13. Vagn Walfrid Ekman
14. Nansen observes ice drifting to the right of the wind
15. Ekman publishes the theory of wind-driven surface transport
16. Evidence
17. Variation of the Coriolis parameter with latitude — the beta effect — crowds the return flow of a wind-driven gyre into a narrow, intense western boundary current; with a constant Coriolis parameter the circulation is symmetric. Located by citation and described from teaching notes and commemorative accounts; the 1948 paper was not fetched.