Velcro Measurements of Turbulence in Coastal Oceans
Abstract
Significant turbulent transports within coastal oceans have been shown to be highly sporadic in both time and space, challenging present ship-based, labour-intensive turbulence measurement techniques. My long-term goal is to lower the cost and effort required to find those locations which dominate coastal mixing, to describe their time evolution, and to quantify their effects. The ultimate objective is an automated system, operating without ship support and returning data via local radio (cell-phone) networks. The goal of this project is to develop survey tools - instrumentation and analysis techniques - which will produce 2-dimensional fields of important turbulent quantities simultaneously with the mean shear and density fields which generate them. Such survey tools will be essential if we are first to find the hot spots of coastal ocean turbulence (allowing more expensive techniques to be concentrated in the most important areas) and then to provide an adequate description of turbulent flow evolution over the enormous range of temporal scales which are relevant to coastal oceans, from the semi-diurnal tidal period through annual and interannual variations in buoyancy forcing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA633929
Entities
People
- Ann Gargett
Organizations
- Institute of Ocean Sciences