C. Heuzé, J.K. Ridley, D. Calvert, D.P. Stevens and K.J. Heywood (2015), Increasing vertical mixing to reduce Southern Ocean deep convection in NEMO3.4, Geoscientific Model Development, NEMO special issue, vol 8, pp 3119-3130 doi:10.5194/gmd-8-3119-2015

Fig 5: For each experiment, contours where deep convection occurs in the Weddell Gyre.

Sensitivity experiments on a version of the ocean model NEMO with a prescribed atmospheric forcing to find a way to minimalise Southern Ocean deep convection.
We found that the Weddell Polynya opens, and deep convection occurs subsequently, because warm anomalies accumulate at the surface.

Hence, rather counter-intuitively, vertical mixing needs to be increased in order to reduce the spurious deep convection, by preventing surface waters to become too warm for sea ice to form.

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