Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

It's well known that climate simulations depend on the magnitude of ocean mixing, but watermass modification depends on the gradient of the mixing - a much higher bar for measurement. As we move towards understanding mixing near fronts and the ocean's upper and lower boundaries, we require much better accuracy and resolution - and a reexamination of the assumptions we use to compute mixing from microstructure. In this talk I go over the confusing details of how turbulence leads to watermass modification and upwelling in two submarine canyons. I also present our early attempts to make measurements in the reference frame of the evolving turbulence in order to measure tricky quantities such as mixing efficiency and to check some of the assumptions going into turbulence recipes such as Osborn-Cox.