Scientific questions about South China Sea ocean dynamics
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Scientific questions about South China Sea ocean dynamics HUANG Rui Xin1, 2 , DU Yan1 1 State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Guangzhou 510301, China 2 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA
Received 19 March 2015; accepted 15 May 2015 ©The Chinese Society of Oceanography and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Abstract
South China Sea, its circulation and connection with other parts of the world oceans, poses important scientific questions. From the prospective view, we postulate ten key research directions to be pursued in the coming future, including ventilation of a monsoon dominated sea, water mass formation/transformation, heat/salt and water mass balance, energetics and mixing, mesoscale eddies, the role of typhoon, deep circulation and paleoclimate records, interaction with adjacent oceans, upwelling and ecology system, and response to climate changes. Key words: South China Sea, ocean dynamics, circulation, gyre interaction, ventilation, mixing Citation: Huang Rui Xin, Du Yan. 2015. Scientific questions about South China Sea ocean dynamics. Acta Oceanologica Sinica, 34(11): 1–5, doi: 10.1007/s13131-015-0756-y
1 Introduction South China Sea (SCS) is one of the largest marginal seas in the world oceans. The SCS is both a marginal sea and a deep sea; its circulation includes both the wind-driven and thermohaline components. SCS is rich in many complicated dynamic processes, including wind-driven gyres forced by wind stress which is also dominated by the annual cycle of the monsoon. SCS is a combination of a marginal sea and a deep sea; thus, its dynamic structure is regulated by turbulent processes taking place in the relatively shallow marginal sea and the deep ocean driven by mechanical energy provided by tides and internal wave breaking.
Climate variability signals can be exchanged via both the atmospheric bridge and the oceanic bridge, which can be interpreted as the exchange of energy and other dynamic elements with the open Pacific, through the exchange with the adjacent oceans via the South China Sea Throughflow (SCSTF). Therefore, SCS is a quite unique dynamic system, as sketched in Fig. 1. Due to its small size, it is relatively easy to examine its circulation with fine resolution; thus, the SCS may serve as a mini world ocean, and its study may provide a good example for the circulation in the world oceans. Furthermore, the SCS is in a regime dominated by strong annual
Fig. 1. Sketch of the main components of the circulation system in the South China Sea and its adjacent oceans.
Foundation item: The Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under contract Nos XDA11010103 and XDA11010203; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 41176024; the Chinese Academy of Sciences/State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (CAS/SAFEA) International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams. *Corresponding author, E-mail: r
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