SACUS-SPACES
Working group Experimental Oceanography
SACUS-SPACES
Coastal countries of southwest Africa strongly depend upon their ocean: societal development, fisheries, and tourism face important changes associated with climate variability and global change. Global climate change will particularly impact eastern boundary upwelling regions by a combination of different stressors: increasing temperatures, acidification and de-oxygenation. The main focus of this study is on the coastal upwelling off southern Africa, its variability forced locally by the wind field and remotely by wave propagation and water mass advection from the equatorial region, its response to climate change, and its impact on rainfall of the region. The project aims at building and expanding local capacities required for the monitoring and prediction of the variability of the upwelling system and of the climate of surrounding land areas by cooperative research, joint summer/winter schools and scientist/technician exchange, by teaching of PhD and Master Students from southern African countries at German Universities, by research cruises open for southern African participants and by providing data and model output for analysis at southern African universities and institutes.
The Experimental Oceanography group contributes to these aims with one sub-project:
SP 3: Upwelling filaments near Lüderitz and their interaction with the South Atlantic eastern boundary circulation
The main goal of the subproject is to study upwelling filaments near Lüderitz and quantify their role in the heat exchange between the coastal region and the open ocean. The mechanisms for upwelling filament generation and dynamics will be addressed, as well as their decay in the open Atlantic. Shipborne and mooring work will focusses on the Lüderitz upwelling cell, since this is a region of high filament activity, which was sparsely covered by in-situ measurements before. Remote sensing and historical hydrographic data analysis will cover the whole SACUS region and will be used to estimate the total horizontal heat flux associated with the filaments between the open ocean and the coastal region. Ultimately we hope that the results from this process study will lead to an improved parameterization of the meso- and submesoscale processes in climate models.
Detlef Quadfasel, Kerstin Jochumsen, Elisabeth Hösen
Other Subprojects in SACUS:
SP 1: Connectivity of the southeast Atlantic coastal upwelling system to the equatorial current system (Brandt, Kanzow, Visbeck, GEOMAR, Kiel)
SP 2: Variability of poleward transports in the eastern boundary current of the Southeast Atlantic (Mohrholz, Schmidt, IOW, Warnemünde)
SP 4: Tropical Atlantic climate and predictability (Greatbatch, Latif, GEOMAR, Kiel)
- Duration: 2013-2016
- Project lead: Prof. i.R. Dr. Detlef Quadfasel
- Sponsor: BMBF