Thermohaline Staircase Detection with an Unsupervised Clustering Method

Introduction

The main focus of my graduate research was on detecting and tracking thermohaline staircase layers in the Canada Basin of the Arctic Ocean. This effort encompassed the first two projects in my thesis, each of which were subsequently published as journal articles:

• Schee, M.G., E. Rosenblum, J.M. Lilly, and N. Grisouard (2024) “Unsupervised clustering identifies thermohaline staircases in the Canada Basin of the Arctic Ocean,” Environmental Data Science, 3:e13, 1-19, DOI: 10.1017/eds.2024.13
  • This work describes the unsupervised clustering method used to track staircase layers across many different profiles of the Arctic Ocean and demonstrates that the results match those of previous studies when using data that spans approximately one year.
• Schee, M.G., E. Rosenblum, J.M. Lilly, and N. Grisouard (2026) “Decadal coherence of Arctic thermohaline staircases,” Submitted to Geophysical Research Letters, Available on: ESS Open Archive
  • This work uses the method described in the previous paper to track thermohaline staircase layers across 17 years of data in the Arctic Ocean and uses that data set to investigate the long-term evolution of these structures.