Audrey Delpech

OS Ocean Sciences

The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Audrey Delpech for the poster/PICO entitled:

Mid-depth circulation in the tropical Pacific Ocean (Delpech, A.; Cravatte, S.; Marin, F.; Morel, Y.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Audrey Delpech is currently a second year PhD student at the Laboratoire d’Etudes Géophysiques et d’Océanographie Spatiale (LEGOS) in Toulouse, France.
Her research focuses on understanding the deep circulation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, where energetics currents forming alternating zonal jets have been revealed at a basin scale.
This PICO presentation shows what the analysis of the tracer fields gathered from many different cruises in the tropical Pacific tells us on the dynamics of the deep zonal jets and the transport and transformation of water masses. It shows in particular that the jets likely advect oxygen from the western boundary towards the Oxygen Minimum Zone in the Eastern part of the basin and participate in the erosion of intermediate water masses. In addition, it is shown that these same data may also highlight the presence of recurrent localized isopycnal mixing. Such a mixing pattern has been proposed as a potential mechanism of zonal jet acceleration in some theoretical studies but was still lacking observational evidences.