Estel Font

OS Ocean Sciences

The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Estel Font for the poster/PICO entitled:

Arabian Sea Mode Water: A Key Player in Surface-to-Interior Exchange (Font, E.; Queste, B.; Swart, S.; Vinaychandran, P. N.; Portela, E.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Estel Font is a final-year PhD student in physical oceanography at the University of Gothenburg. She studies the dynamics of oxygen ventilation within the Arabian Sea oxygen minimum zone, focusing on how key water masses influence oxygen distribution across temporal and spatial scales.

The study presented at EGU25 investigated the characteristics of Arabian Sea mode water. Mode water regulates surface-to-interior fluxes and serves as a major pathway for oxygen into the upper oxygen minimum zone. Combining observations from ocean gliders and Argo floats with numerical models, the study characterized mode water properties and identified the dominant processes driving its variability, from seasonal monsoon forcing and basin-scale circulation to transient mesoscale eddies.