Internal Waves in Straits Experiment Progress Report

Abstract

Our long-term goal is to understand how energy is supplied to the ocean, and how it subsequently cascades to the turbulence and mixing important to the circulation, and the transport and distribution of tracers. This problem involves scales spanning sub-inertial motions to turbulence, and therefore requires integrative efforts with other sea-going investigators and numerical modelers. The South China Sea project was an ideal opportunity to investigate the cascade from internal tides to higher frequency waves though the processes of internal wave scattering and non-linear steepening. To understand the modification of internal tides as they encounter the continental shelf. To understand how energy partitions between linear and non-linear internal waves in the internal tide generation region of the South China Sea To determine sites of high turbulence dissipation at the generation site. To date, my approach for this project has been to use a numerical modeling to understand where turbulence dissipation will occur over supercrtical topography. These numerical models are two-dimensional iterations of the MITgcm, so relatively high resolution runs are attainable as are many iterations allowing the examination of significant parameter space.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA527097

Entities

People

  • Jody M. Klymak

Organizations

  • University of Victoria

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Continental Shelves
  • Continental Slopes
  • Data Sets
  • Demographic Cohorts
  • Dissipation
  • Extreme Environments
  • Frequency
  • High Resolution
  • Internal Waves
  • Oceans
  • Phase Distortion
  • Solitons
  • South China Sea
  • Standing Waves
  • Topography
  • Water
  • Waves

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers

Technology Areas

  • Space