ocedata (version 0.2.2)

conveyor: Conveyor-belt path

Description

Locations that yield a spline that roughly matches Broecker's conveyor-belt path.

Usage

data(conveyor, package="ocedata")

Details

The data were digitized from Figure 1 of Broecker (1991), by a multistep process. First, a world map was drawn with mapPlot from the oce package, using a projection (Mercator) that seemed similar to of Broecker. Second, locator() was used to digitize points along his conveyor-belt pathlines. No projection information being provided by Broecker, this had to be done by coastline reference. Third, the x-y data were converted to longitude-latitude space using map2lonlat() in the oce package. When this was done, splines were fitted to the data and the resultant paths were drawn on the map (using code like that given in the example). Then, some adjustments were made to the data files, to get the splines to more faithfully represent the paths on Broecker's diagram.

References

Broecker, W. S., 1991. The great ocean conveyor. Oceanography, 4: 79-89.

Examples

data(conveyor, package="ocedata")
if (FALSE) {
library(oce)
data(coastlineWorld, package="oce")
par(mar=rep(1,4))
oce::mapPlot(coastlineCut(coastlineWorld,70), projection="+proj=wintri +lon_0=70")
# Main path
lon <- subset(conveyor, path==1)$longitude
lat <- subset(conveyor, path==1)$latitude
oce::mapLines(lon, lat, col="blue", lwd=3)
## Secondary path (in Indian Ocean)
lon <- subset(conveyor, path==2)$longitude
lat <- subset(conveyor, path==2)$latitude
oce::mapLines(lon, lat, col="darkgreen", lwd=3)
}