The ocean's memory of the atmosphere: Residence-time and ventilation-rate distributions of water masses

A conceptually new approach to diagnosing tracer-independent ventilation rates is developed. Tracer Green functions are exploited to partition ventilation rates according to the ventilated fluid's residence time in the ocean interior and according to where this fluid enters and exits the interior. In the presence of mixing by mesoscale eddies, which are reasonably represented by diffusion, ventilation rates for overlapping entry and exit regions cannot meaningfully be characterized by a single rate. It is a physical consequence of diffusive transport that fluid elements that spend an infinitesimally short time in the interior cause singularly large ventilation rates for overlapping entry and exit regions. Therefore, ventilation must generally be characterized by a ventilation-rate distribution, phi, partitioned according to the time that the ventilated fluid spends in the interior between successive surface contacts. An offline forward and adjoint time-averaged OGCM is used to illustrate the rich detail that phi and the closely related probability density function of residence times R provide on the way the ocean communicates with the surface. These diagnostics quantify the relative importance of various surface regions for ventilating the interior ocean by either exposing old water masses to the atmosphere or by forming newly ventilated ones. The model results suggest that the Southern Ocean plays a dominant role in ventilating the ocean, both as a region where new waters are ventilated into the interior and where old waters are first reexposed to the atmosphere.