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Article: Towards a model of Atlantic Ocean circulation: the plumbing of the climate's radiator.
- Article from:
- Oceanus
- Article date:
- March 22, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The theme of physical oceanographers' research is the exploration and explanation of ocean circulation as a natural physical phenomenon with scales from millimeters to megameters. In this context, the word "model" usually brings to mind a theoretician analytically or numerically solving some system of equations that might capture the essence of the physics of some particular part of the ocean circulation. In other words, the theoretician's model attempts to explain the causes and mechanisms of observed phenomena in the ocean, or perhaps predict unobserved ones.
Those of us who make ocean circulation observations often get involved in a different sort of model. While ...