[12-Feb-2018] Farrar, J.T., Rainville, L., Shcherbina, A., Plueddemann, A.J., Hodges, B., Schmitt, R.W., Kessler, W.S., Riser, S., and Edson, J.B.
Presented at the 2018 Ocean Sciences MeetingThe Salinity Processes in the Upper-ocean Regional Study (SPURS) was a two-part field campaign focused on understanding the physical processes affecting the evolution of upper-ocean salinity: SPURS1 focused on the region of climatological maximum sea surface salinity in the subtropical North Atlantic, and SPURS2 focused on the high-precipitation region of the northeastern tropical Pacific Inter-tropical Convergence Zone. An upper-ocean salinity budget provides a useful framework for guiding progress toward our ultimate goal of understanding how different physical processes affect upper-ocean salinity. The SPURS1 and SPURS2 measurement programs included heavily instrumented air-sea interaction moorings, which allows accurate estimates of the surface fluxes, and a dense array of measurements from moorings, Argo floats, gliders, and satellites. These data are used to estimate terms in the surface-layer salinity and heat budgets during the SPURS campaigns, and we use the budget to guide discussion of how ocean dynamics affect sea surface salinity.