Loop Current Impact on the Transport of Mississippi River Waters

Abstract

ABSTRACT Schiller, R.V. and Kourafalou, V.H., 2014. Loop current impact on the transport of Mississippi river waters. River plume studies have traditionally focused on coastal and shelf circulation. Here, we examine novel interactions of a large river plume with offshore flows, which introduces additional export pathways for the riverine waters. We show the impact of the Loop Current System (LCS) on the offshore transport and fate of Mississippi River (MR) plume waters. The high-resolution Northern Gulf of Mexico (NGoM) model, nested in a data-assimilative, regional, Gulf of Mexico model, was employed for a 5-year, realistically forced simulation. Model results, in tandem with satellite data, demonstrate that the entrainment of MR waters by the LCS varies interannually and extends pathways of shelf cross-marginal transport to the basin interior and beyond. Plume-to-LCS interactions are determined by episodic northward intrusions of the LCS in the NGoM. If the intrusion is very close to the MR Delta, plume...