Finescale Vertical Structure of the Upwelling System off Southern Peru as Observed from Glider Data

Abstract

Abstract The upwelling system off southern Peru has been observed using an autonomous underwater vehicle (a Slocum glider) during October–November 2008. Nine cross-front sections have been carried out across an intense upwelling cell near 14°S. During almost two months, profiles of temperature, salinity, and fluorescence were collected at less than 1-km resolution, between the surface and 200-m depth. Estimates of alongshore absolute geostrophic velocities were inferred from the density field and the glider drift between two surfacings. In the frontal region, salinity and biogeochemical fields displayed cross-shore submesoscale filamentary structures throughout the mission. Those features presented a width of 10–20 km, a vertical extent of ~150 m, and appeared to propagate toward the shore. They were steeper than isopycnals and kept an aspect ratio close to f/N, the inverse of the Prandtl ratio. These filamentary structures may be interpreted mainly as a manifestation of submesoscale turbulence through stirring of the salinity gradients by the mesoscale eddy field. However, meandering of the front or cross-frontal wind-driven instabilities could also play a role in inducing vertical velocities.