Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 42 (2015): 7639–7647, doi:10.1002/2015GL065043.
Description:
Oceanic internal waves are closely linked to turbulence. Here a relationship between vertical wave number (kz) spectra of fine-scale vertical kinetic energy (VKE) and turbulent dissipation ε is presented using more than 250 joint profiles from five diverse dynamic regimes, spanning latitudes between the equator and 60°. In the majority of the spectra VKE varies as inline image. Scaling VKE with inline image collapses the off-equatorial spectra to within inline image but underestimates the equatorial spectrum. The simple empirical relationship between VKE and ε fits the data better than a common shear-and-strain fine-scale parameterization, which significantly underestimates ε in the two data sets that are least consistent with the Garrett-Munk (GM) model. The new relationship between fine-scale VKE and dissipation rate can be interpreted as an alternative, single-parameter scaling for turbulent dissipation in terms of fine-scale internal wave vertical velocity that requires no reference to the GM model spectrum.
Description:
National Science Foundation Grant Numbers: OCE-0728766, OCE-0425361, OCE-0424953, OCE-1029722, OCE-0622630, OCE-1030309, OCE-1232962, and Office of Naval Research Grant Number: N00014-10-10315
Keywords:
Internal waves
;
Turbulence
;
Mixing
;
Vertical kinetic energy
;
Finestructure parameterization
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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