Meeting on the Physical Oceanography of Sea Straits (2nd). Held in Villefanche-sur-Mer, France on 15-19 April 2002
Abstract
During April 15-19, 2002, a meeting was held in Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, to discuss the physical oceanography of sea straits. The meeting was attended by 50 or so participants and was a follow-on to a similar workshop held in Les Arcs, France, in 1989. Half-day sessions were devoted to overviews of recent field programs, advances in instrumentation, and development of new theories and models over the past decade. Each session consisted of an overview talk, a poster session, and a group discussion. Extended abstracts describing the talks and posters can be downloaded from the following sites: http ://www .soc.soton.ac.uk/JRD/PROC/STRAIT/talks zip http ://www. soc. soton.ac.uk/JRD/PROC/STRAIT/posters.zip The following is a summary of the major topics of discussion that took place as reported by the session rapporteurs. The unedited session reports appear at the end of this report. One of the main topics that occupied discussion over the week was `mixing'. Early talk centered on the growing evidence of the importance of Helmholtz vs. Homboe (vs. Kelvin- Helmholtz) instability in hydraulically-driven two-layer systems. This was followed by an exchange, somewhat semantic in nature, concerning the use of the terms `entrainment and `detrainment'. A related and more important point concerned the applicability of entraining shallow-water layer models such as streamtube models. How well do they reproduce the physics of hydraulically driven turbulent flows with continuous stratification and what is their range of applicability? This topic is important in the modeling of mixing in the immediate lee of a sill or over larger scales in outflow plumes. Plume modelers wondered whether there is a universal (parameterizable) behavior of the entrainment processes. One difficulty with developing such a parameterization is the presence of multiple physical processes (bottom boundary layer turbulence, interfacial instability, etc.).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 19, 2002
- Accession Number
- ADA451697
Entities
People
- David Farmer
- David Smeed
- Larry Pratt
- Louis Prieur
- Mike Gregg
- Steve Murray
Organizations
- University of Southampton