Sverdrup balance

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Harald Sverdrup in 1947 proposed a theory of ocean circulation and derived a relationship between the wind forcing (expressed as the curl of the wind stress) and the mass transport of the upper ocean. This relationship is known as the Sverdrup balance. In 1948 Henry Stommel proposed a circulation for the entire ocean depth by starting with the same equations as Sverdrup but adding bottom friction, and showed that the variation in Coriolis parameter with latitude results in a narrow western boundary current in ocean basins. Walter Munk in 1950 combined the results of Rossby (eddy viscosity), Sverdrup (upper ocean wind driven flow) and Stommel (western boundary current flow) and proposed a complete solution for the ocean circulation.

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