Lateral Mixing DRI: Turbulence-Resolving Simulations of Upper-Ocean Lateral Mixing

摘要

This study contributes to our long-term efforts toward understanding: Mixed layer dynamics, processes that communicate atmospheric forcing to the ocean interior, frontal dynamics, in particular the role of surface forcing in lateral mixing, and the interaction of finescale and submesoscale upper-ocean mixing at fronts. The focus of modeling in this study is to quantify relationships between surface fluxes of heat, energy and momentum, the available baroclinic potential energy, the resultant vertical mixing and geostrophic imbalance, and the ensuing dependence of lateral mixing at successively larger scales on atmospheric forcing. In this year of the DRI the emphasis of my worked changed more to participating in the field program by providing a suite of shore support products from remote sensing and assimilative ocean models. This relatively minor component of the original proposal to ONR became more important to this DRI and has required a greater fraction of my effort than anticipated this year. Although it has thus, for the most part, served the LatMix DRI well this past year during a filed experiment using three vessels, modeling goals remain chief among my objectives.