Anisotropic wave-vortex decomposition of ship-track and Lagrangian tracer data
Abstract
Recently developed methods (Bühler, Callies, Ferrari 2014) allow a linear wave-vortex decomposition of one-dimensional velocity and buoyancy spectra measured along ship tracks as a function of the along-track wavenumber. These methods are especially useful in the ocean submesoscale, where they provide insight into the relative magnitude of geostrophic motions versus internal gravity waves, with dynamical implications for mixing and diffusion among other things.
However, so far these methods have been restricted to flow fields with horizontally isotropic statistics. In this talk we describe a recent extension of the method (Bühler, Kuang, Tabak 2017) that allows for a certain kind of horizontal anisotropy, and which is tested against Gulf Stream data. We also describe on-going work on adapting these methods to work on data obtained from Lagrangian tracers, rather than straight ship tracks.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMOS52A..02B
- Keywords:
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- 4255 Numerical modeling;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERALDE: 4273 Physical and biogeochemical interactions;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERALDE: 4520 Eddies and mesoscale processes;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICALDE: 4568 Turbulence;
- diffusion;
- and mixing processes;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL