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| Titel |
Vertical Kinetic Energy of Internal Gravity Waves and Turbulent Dissipation in the Ocean |
| VerfasserIn |
Andreas Thurnherr, Louis St. Laurent, Kelvin Richards, John Toole |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2015
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 17 (2015) |
| Datensatznummer |
250114263
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2015-14576.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Internal gravity waves in the ocean are closely associated with turbulence and mixing. The
relationship between IGWs and turbulence is usually interpreted in the framework of
the Garret-Munk model, a prescription for open-ocean internal-wave energy as a
function of several environmental parameters. Here, we evaluate the relationship
between internal-wave energy and turbulence directly, using more than 250 joint
profiles of turbulent dissipation from microstructure, and vertical velocity from
CTD/LADCP measurements. The observations include profiles from a wide variety of
dynamical regimes and latitudes between the equator and 60°. In most profiles, finescale
vertical kinetic energy (VKE) varies as kz-2, where kz is the vertical wave number.
Scaling VKE with dissipation collapses all off-equatorial data-set average spectra
to within /2 or better. The dissipation-normalized spectrum can be interpreted
as a new single-parameter (dissipation) model for internal-wave VKE, which is
considerably simpler and more accurate than the corresponding Garrett-Munk model. |
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