Publication Date:
2022-10-20
Description:
© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Zippel, S. F., Farrar, J. T., Zappa, C. J., & Plueddemann, A. J. Parsing the kinetic energy budget of the ocean surface mixed layer. Geophysical Research Letters, 49(2), (2022): 2021GL095920, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL095920.
Description:
The total rate of work done on the ocean by the wind is of considerable interest for understanding global energy balances, as the energy from the wind drives ocean currents, grows surface waves, and forces vertical mixing. A large but unknown fraction of this atmospheric energy is dissipated by turbulence in the upper ocean. The focus of this work is twofold. First, we describe a framework for evaluating the vertically integrated turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) equation using measurable quantities from a surface mooring, showing the connection to the atmospheric, mean oceanic, and wave energy. Second, we use this framework to evaluate turbulent energetics in the mixed layer using 10 months of mooring data. This evaluation is made possible by recent advances in estimating TKE dissipation rates from long-enduring moorings. We find that surface fluxes are balanced by TKE dissipation rates in the mixed layer to within a factor of two.
Description:
This work was funded by NSF Award No. 2023 020, and by NASA as part of the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), supporting field work for SPURS-1 (NASA Grant No. NNX11AE84G), and for analysis (NASA Grant No. 80NSSC18K1494), and as part of SASSIE (NASA Grant No. 80NSSC21K0832). This work was also funded by NSF through Grant Award Nos. 1756 839, 2049546, and by ONR through Grant N000141712880 (MISO-BoB).
Keywords:
Air/sea interaction
;
Turbulence
;
Mixed layer
;
Wind work
;
Boundary layer
;
Waves
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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