Investigation of Microstructure and Transport in Stably Stratified Turbulent Shear Flow

摘要

Our long term goal is to provide fundamental experimental and computational understanding of the evolution of turbulent mixing in a stratified fluid which will serve as a sound basis for interpretation of ocean measurements, particularly those determining ocean microstructure stirring and mixing. Our objective is to quantitatively determine the full energy balances in evolving or steady state stably stratified turbulent shear flows, including determination of effective eddy diffusivities. These can serve both as diagnostics for small scale ocean microstructure measurements and can provide realistic, buoyancy influenced eddy diffusivities and more sophisticated transport models which can serve as necessary small scale input modeling larger scale modeling such as ocean circulation and ocean climate models.