In winter, heat loss increases density at the surface of the Southern Ocean. This increase of density creates a mixed layer deeper than 250m only in a narrow deep mixing band (DMB) located around 50°S. We found that north of the DMB, the stratification is too strong to be eroded, so mixed layers are shallower. The density of cold water is almost not impacted by temperature changes. Thus, heat loss does not increase significantly the density south of the DMB, so no deep mixed layers are produced.
The analyses are conducted using Python, and the whole workflow is organised by using snakemake. When all input data are downloaded (scripts are provided to download each dataset from their official sources), only few commands are necessary to reproduce all figures from the paper.
Side note: the paper is accepted, but is not published yet. The data and code are available in the version that will be published, but are not in the preprint (see the URL I provide in the following sections).
I tried as hard as possible to make it reproducible, which it is on my computer. I would be happy to see if this still works on other computers. Moreover, by allowing easy reproducibility, I hope that other people may easily build research on top of this work.
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