AESOP Internal Tides and Mixing
Abstract
This project, with Eric Kunze at the University of Victoria (now at APL-UW), was undertaken as part of a Departmental Research Initiative (DRI) of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) entitled AESOP (Assessing the Effectiveness of Submesoscale Ocean Parameterizations). The principal goals of AESOP were to (a) increase the understanding of ocean dynamics particularly processes that are not included or not resolved in numerical models and (b) improve forecasts of ocean conditions. Our (Girton and Kunze) component of the experiment was focused on internal tides and mixing, both in terms of constraining the dominant mechanisms supplying energy for mixing in the ocean and for the purposes of explaining tidal and internal wave velocity variance in the coastal ocean. The principal tasks of AESOP were a set of ocean observations designed to evaluate submesoscale processes (including internal tides and small-scale fronts and eddies) in a suite of models of the coastal ocean around Monterey Bay. These observations formed metrics that could be used to test the representation of the processes in the models. In addition, model studies were undertaken to study the impact of those processes on the larger-scale fields.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 04, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA561696
Entities
People
- Eric Kunze
- James B. Girton
Organizations
- University of Washington