Resolving the Paradox of Oceanic Large-Scale Balance and Small-Scale Mixing

R. Marino, A. Pouquet, and D. Rosenberg
Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 114504 – Published 18 March 2015
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Abstract

A puzzle of oceanic dynamics is the contrast between the observed geostrophic balance, involving gravity, pressure gradient, and Coriolis forces, and the necessary turbulent transport: in the former case, energy flows to large scales, leading to spectral condensation, whereas in the latter, it is transferred to small scales, where dissipation prevails. The known bidirectional constant-flux energy cascade maintaining both geostrophic balance and mixing tends towards flux equilibration as turbulence strengthens, contradicting models and recent observations which find a dominant large-scale flux. Analyzing a large ensemble of high-resolution direct numerical simulations of the Boussinesq equations in the presence of rotation and no salinity, we show that the ratio of the dual energy flux to large and to small scales agrees with observations, and we predict that it scales with the inverse of the Froude and Rossby numbers when stratification is (realistically) stronger than rotation. Furthermore, we show that the kinetic and potential energies separately undergo a bidirectional transfer to larger and smaller scales. Altogether, this allows for small-scale mixing which drives the global oceanic circulation and will thus potentially lead to more accurate modeling of climate dynamics.

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  • Received 28 September 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.114504

© 2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

R. Marino1,2,3, A. Pouquet4,1, and D. Rosenberg5

  • 1National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, Colorado 80307, USA
  • 2Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 3Institute for Chemical-Physical Processes—IPCF/CNR, Rende (CS) 87036, Italy
  • 4Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
  • 5National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P.O. Box 2008, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA

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Issue

Vol. 114, Iss. 11 — 20 March 2015

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