Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)

The Brazil Current (BC) is probably the least known and explored of the western boundary currents of the world ocean. In this talk, we offer a brief overview of the research carried out at the Oceanographic Institute of the University of São Paulo (IOUSP) on this current system's general pattern, water masses and meridionally changing vertical structure. We focus here on the latitude range (21S­26S) at which the BC vertical structure very closely approaches the one predicted in the seminal work by Henry Stommel (1965). We explore the spatial­ temporal variability and conduct some first­order dynamical studies of this "Stommelian" BC by blending quasi­synoptic data sets, mooring data and simple process oriented modeling.