An Introduction to the Special Issue on Internal Waves

Abstract

This special issue of Oceanography presents a survey of recent work on internal waves in the ocean. The undersea analogue to the surface waves we see breaking on beaches, internal waves play an important role in transferring heat energy, and momentum in the ocean. When they break, the turbulence they produce is a vital aspect of the ocean's meridional overturning circulation. Numerical circulation models must parameterize internal waves and their breaking because computers will likely never be powerful enough to simultaneously resolve climate and internal wave scales.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA565437

Entities

People

  • Louis St. Laurent
  • Matthew H. Alford
  • Terri Paluszkiewicz

Organizations

  • Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Energy
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Frequency
  • Heat Energy
  • Internal Waves
  • Oceanography
  • Oceans
  • Physical Oceanography
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Ridges
  • Solitons
  • Surface Waves
  • Tidal Power
  • Topography
  • Turbulence
  • Turbulent Mixing
  • Waves

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Coastal Oceanography
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers
  • Systems Analysis and Design