The general circulation of the pacific ocean and a brief account of the oceanographic structure of the north pacific ocean part I - circulation and volume transports

Abstract

A review of the surface and subsurface circulation of the North and South Pacific Oceans is presented together with a brief review of the structures of physical oceanographic properties ofthe North Pacific Ocean. Our knowledge of the distribution of surface currents and sea surface temperatures is more complete than that of other properties. Principally this is because of the greater amount of available data which has been collected by the merchant and naval ships of the world’s maritime nations, emphasizing the contributions they have made to oceanography. Despite this information,however, present knowledge about major surface currents is limited to their mean velocities, except for the Kuroshio and some of the equatorial currents about which we have some vague notions as to their variability. The intermediate water of the Pacific Ocean as a whole has been studied in detail only once. Our knowledge of the oceanic heat transport is also very limited.The flow in a meridional section in the vertical plane will require special study as it may have important bearing on the heat transported by the ocean currents. Although volume transport for the major ocean currents has been estimated, the estimates are so few and the methods usedto determine the transport so inconsistent that it is dif-ficult to make a meaningful compari-son of the transport values. Estimates that vary by a factor of two are com-mon; some vary by an order of magni-tude. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.