《Laboratory simulation of the influence of geothermal heating on the interior ocean》.pdfVIP

Acta Oceanol. Sin., 2014, Vol. 33, No. 9, P. 25–31 DOI: 10.1007/s13131-014-0512-8 E-mail: hyxbe@263.net Laboratory simulation of the influence of geothermal heating on the interior ocean 1 1,2 1 1,2 ZHOU Shengqi *, QU Ling , ZHAO Xiaozheng , WAN Wei 1 State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510301, China 2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China Received 5 April 2013; accepted 23 January 2014 ©The Chinese Society of Oceanography and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Abstract This study, using laboratory experiments and scaling analysis, evaluates the influence of geothermal heat- ing on global oceanic circulation. Upon a well-developed large-scale convective flow, an additional heat flux perturbation δF /F is employed. The increments of flow and thermal properties, including eddy diffusivity K , flow velocity V and bottom temperature T , are found to be independent of the applied heat flux F . To- T b gether with the scaling analysis of convective flow at different configurations, where the flow is thermally driven in the relatively low or extremely high turbulent thermal convections or the horizontal convection, the variances of flow properties, δK /K and δV/V, are found to be close to 0.5% and 0.75% at δF /F=2%. This T T means that the small heat flux perturbation plays a negligible role in the global convective flow. However, δT /ΔT is found to be 1.5% at δF /F=2%, which would have a significant effect in the local region. The results b might provide a clue to understanding the influence of geothermal heating on global oceanic circulation. It is expected that geothermal heating will contribute less than 1% in turbu