sw.spice {oce}R Documentation

Seawater spiciness

Description

Compute seawater "spice" (a variable orthogonal to density in TS space)

Usage

spice <- sw.spice(ctd)
spice <- sw.spice(S, t=NULL, p=NULL)

Arguments

ctd an object of class "ctd".
S salinity [PSU]
t in-situ temperature [degC]
p pressure [dbar]

Details

In the first form, the argument is a ctd object, from which the salinity, temperature and pressure values are extracted and used to for the calculation.

Roughly speaking, seawater with a high spiciness is relatively warm and salty compared with less spicy water. Another interpretation is that spice is a variable measuring distance orthogonal to isopycnal lines on TS diagrams (if the diagrams are scaled to make the isopycnals run at 45 degres). The definition used here is that of Pierre Flament. (Other formulations exist.) Note that pressure is ignored in the definition. Spiceness is sometimes denoted pi(S,t,p).

Value

Spice [kg/m^3].

Author(s)

Dan Kelley

References

P. Flament, 2002. A state variable for characterizing water masses and their diffusive stability: spiciness. Progr. Oceanog., 54, 493-501.

Examples

spice <- sw.spice(35, 10, 0) # 1.1 by eye, from Flament's fig2

[Package oce version 0.1.72 Index]