Yucatan Channel Transports: Singular Vectors and Stochastic Optimals

J. Sheinbaum (1), A. M. Moore (2) and E. Di Lorenzo (3)

(1) CICESE, Mexico,
(2) University of Colorado, Boulder Co, USA,
(3) Georgia Institute of Technology

The Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) circulation model and its adjoint, are used in the western Caribbean-Gulf of Mexico region to calculate the structure of perturbations to the model initial conditions (singular vectors), and stochastic forcing (stochastic optimals), that generate the largest transport variability through the Yucatan Channel (YC). The model uses the same configuration to the one employed in a high-resolution North-Atlantic simulation of 30 sigma levels and 10 km horizontal resolution (Arango, pers. comm.). Open boundary conditions for the model are obtained from the North-Atlantic simulation. Results highlight the importance of wave processes within the Gulf of Mexico and may explain recent transport variability observations in the YC, which showed poor correlation with the local wind-stress forcing.