Alexander Soloviev, Nova Southeastern: Upwelling Events

COMPASS 2024-02-07: Alexander Soloviev, Nova Southeastern University
"Physical Oceanographic Aspects of Upwelling Events on the Southeast Florida Shelf"
Alexander Soloviev, Alfredo Quezada, Megan Miller, Bernhard Riegl, and Richard Dodge

Coral reef benthic communities are acutely sensitive to changes in environmental parameters such as temperature and nutrient concentrations. Physical oceanographic processes that induce the coastal upwelling therefore act as drivers of community structure on tropical reefs. The cause and frequency of upwellings and how they impact coral communities on the Southeast Florida shelf, however, are not fully understood. The classical wind induced coastal upwelling is not typical for western boundary current regions like the Straits of Florida. We have nevertheless observed prominent upwelling events during hurricane conditions. For example, during Hurricane Wilma 2005 a 4°C drop of the bottom water temperature was registered at an 11 m isobath on the Broward County shelf. Upwelling events can also be caused by internal wave solitons breaking on the continental shelf; an example is the upwelling on Conch Reef that has been studied experimentally (Leichter et al. 1996) and modeled with computational fluid dynamics tools (Miller et al. 2023). Another potential upwelling mechanism is associated with the southward jet attached on the Southeast Florida shelf (Soloviev et al. 2017), which lifts the cold deeper water towards the coast due to the Coriolis effect. This process is being elucidated from a year-long series of glider transects on the shelf between Ft. Lauderdale and Jupiter, FL (Quezada et al. 2023). The upwelling events bringing cold and rich with nutrients water to the coral reef benthic communities may alter, suppress, or provide a natural buffer against climate impacts and could potentially enhance the efficacy of spatial management and reef conservation efforts (Zhu et al. 2022).