Pacific Ocean meridional sections

Figure 5 Typical meridional sections for each ocean compiled from a subset of the data used for Figure 4. The deep water contour patterns are primarily due to the large-scale thermohaline circulation. The highest deep water A C values are found in the North Atlantic and the lowest in the North Pacific. The natural A C in the upper ocean is contaminated by the influx of bomb-produced radiocarbon.

Comparison of the major features in each section shows that the meridional A C distributions in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are quite similar. The greatest difference between these two is that the Indian Ocean deep water (1500-3500 m) is significantly younger than Pacific deep waters. In both oceans ... 

Figure 8 Panel (C) shows the change in the meridional eastern Pacific thermocline distribution of A C between the GEOSECS (1973-1974, (A)) and WOCE (1991-1994, (B)) surveys. The change was computed by gridding each section then finding the difference. The dashed lines in (C) indicate constant potential density surfaces. Negative near-surface values indicate maximum concentration surfaces moving down into the thermocline after GEOSECS. The region of greatest increase in the southern hemisphere is ventilated in the Southern Ocean.

Figure 13 (Right) Global ocean circulation model results from 12 different coarse-resolution models participating in OCMIP-2 compared to WOCE data for natural A C on a meridional Pacific section. The model groups are identified in each subpanel and in Table 1 All of the models used the same chemistry and boundary conditions.

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