Search

International audience; The Southern Ocean greatly contributes to the regulation of the global climate by controlling important heat and carbon exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean. Rates of climate change on decadal timescales are therefore impacted by oceanic processes taking place in the Southern Ocean, yet too little is known about these processes. Limitations come both from the lack of observations in this extreme environment and its inherent sensitivity to intermittent processes at scales that are not well captured in current Earth system models. The Southern Ocean Carbon and Heat Impact on Climate programme was launched to address this knowledge gap, with the overall objective to understand and quantify variability of heat and carbon budgets in the Southern Ocean through an investigation of the key physical processes controlling exchanges between the atmosphere, ocean and sea ice using a combination of observational and modelling approaches. Here, we provide a brief overview of the programme, as well as a summary of some of the scientific progress achieved during its first half. Advances range from new evidence of the importance of specific processes in Southern Ocean ventilation rate (e.g. storm-induced turbulence, sea-ice meltwater fronts, wind-induced gyre circulation, dense shelf water formation and abyssal mixing) to refined descriptions of the physical changes currently ongoing in the Southern Ocean and of their link with global climate. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue `Heat and carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean: the state of the art and future priorities'.

Air-sea-ice fluxes of heat, freshwater, and carbon in the Southern Ocean are critical to global ocean circulation and climate. During the ice-free summer months, carbon-rich Warm Deep Water (WDW) around Maud Rise in the eastern Weddell Sea is insulated from the atmosphere by a surface mixed layer and residual Winter Water layer. Fluxes across the mixed layer base control exchanges between WDW and the atmosphere, as well as determining water column stability in early winter at the onset of sea ice formation. A weakly stratified winter mixed layer could be susceptible to overturning, leading to ventilation of heat from WDW and the possible formation of an open ocean polynya, as observed over Maud Rise in the 1970s and 2016-17.We use high-resolution observations from autonomous platforms deployed during the 2022 SO-CHIC campaign to analyze the summer to winter mixed layer evolution in the Maud Rise region. 6 free-drifting UpTempO buoys collected over 12,500 hourly temperature profiles of the upper 60 m of the water column between January and June 2022. In addition, a Seaglider and Sailbuoy were deployed around Maud Rise from January to April, and 4 Argo floats remained in the region through austral summer 2023. We use ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis data to model the effect of 1-D processes on upper ocean variability, in order to distinguish the influence of synoptic storm events from submesoscale dynamics and quantify the integrated impact of each of these processes on mixed layer stratification at the onset of sea ice freeze-up., The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023)

The Southern Ocean greatly contributes to the regulation of the global climate by controlling important heat and carbon exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean. Rates of climate change on decadal time scales are therefore impacted by oceanic processes taking place in the Southern Ocean, yet too little is known about these processes. Limitations come both from the lack of observations in this extreme environment and its inherent sensitivity to intermittent processes at scales that are not well captured in current Earth system models. The Southern Ocean Carbon and Heat Impact on Climate programme was launched to address this knowledge gap, with the overall objective to understand and quantify variability of heat and carbon budgets in the Southern Ocean through an investigation of the key physical processes controlling exchanges between the atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice using a combination of observational and modelling approaches. Here, we provide a brief overview of the programme, as well as a summary of some of the scientific progress achieved during its first half. Advances range from new evidence of the importance of specific processes in Southern Ocean ventilation rate (e.g. storm-induced turbulence, sea–ice meltwater fronts, wind-induced gyre circulation, dense shelf water formation and abyssal mixing) to refined descriptions of the physical changes currently ongoing in the Southern Ocean and of their link with global climate.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Heat and carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean: the state of the art and future priorities’.

Many of us “see red,” “feel blue,” or “turn green with envy.” Are such color-emotion associations fundamental to our shared cognitive architecture, or are they cultural creations learned through our languages and traditions? To answer these questions, we tested emotional associations of colors in 4,598 participants from 30 nations speaking 22 native languages. Participants associated 20 emotion concepts with 12 color terms. Pattern-similarity analyses revealed universal color-emotion associations (average similarity coefficient r =.88). However, local differences were also apparent. A machine-learning algorithm revealed that nation predicted color-emotion associations above and beyond those observed universally. Similarity was greater when nations were linguistically or geographically close. This study highlights robust universal color-emotion associations, further modulated by linguistic and geographic factors. These results pose further theoretical and empirical questions about the affective properties of color and may inform practice in applied domains, such as well-being and design. © The Author(s) 2020.

Across cultures, people associate colours with emotions. Here, we test the hypothesis that one driver of this cross-modal correspondence is the physical environment we live in. We focus on a prime example – the association of yellow with joy, – which conceivably arises because yellow is reminiscent of life-sustaining sunshine and pleasant weather. If so, this association should be especially strong in countries where sunny weather is a rare occurrence. We analysed yellow-joy associations of 6625 participants from 55 countries to investigate how yellow-joy associations varied geographically, climatologically, and seasonally. We assessed the distance to the equator, sunshine, precipitation, and daytime hours. Consistent with our hypotheses, participants who live further away from the equator and in rainier countries are more likely to associate yellow with joy. We did not find associations with seasonal variations. Our findings support a role for the physical environment in shaping the affective meaning of colour. © 2019