Is the Faroe Bank Channel overflow hydraulically controlled?

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 36 (2006): 2340-2349, doi:10.1175/JPO2969.1.The overflow of dense water from the Nordic Seas through the Faroe Bank Channel (FBC) has attributes suggesting hydraulic control—primarily an asymmetry across the sill reminiscent of flow over a dam. However, this aspect has never been confirmed by any quantitative measure, nor is the position of the control section known. This paper presents a comparison of several different techniques for assessing the hydraulic criticality of oceanic overflows applied to data from a set of velocity and hydrographic sections across the FBC. These include 1) the cross-stream variation in the local Froude number, including a modified form that accounts for stratification and vertical shear, 2) rotating hydraulic solutions using a constant potential vorticity layer in a channel of parabolic cross section, and 3) direct computation of shallow water wave speeds from the observed overflow structure. Though differences exist, the three methods give similar answers, suggesting that the FBC is indeed controlled, with a critical section located 20–90 km downstream of the sill crest. Evidence of an upstream control with respect to a potential vorticity wave is also presented. The implications of these results for hydraulic predictions of overflow transport and variability are discussed.The Faroe Bank Channel experiment was supported by NSF Grant OCE-9906736. JBG gratefully acknowledges the support of the NOAA/ UCAR Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Program and NSF Grant OCE-9985840. Author Price was supported in part by the U.S. Office of Naval Research through Grant N00014-04-1-0109