LatMix: Studies of Submesoscale Stirring and Mixing
Collection description:
Stirring and lateral mixing by submesoscale processes are believed to play an important role in setting the distribution of energy, vorticity, momentum, and tracers in the ocean, and their transfer from one scale to another. But an inadequate understanding of the underlying processes has limited our ability to reliably include their effects in general circulation models. The ONR Departmental Research Initiative, Scalable Lateral Mixing and Coherent Turbulence (LatMix), aimed to address this gap through intensive observations and modeling of these processes. The initiative included two field efforts in the vicinity of the Gulf Stream. In the first field campaign (June, 2011) three ships and an airborne LIDAR system examined processes in the seasonal pycnocline of the mesoscale eddy field just to the southeast of the Gulf Stream during relatively quiescent early summer conditions. The second campaign (February-March, 2012) was conducted from two ships in the core of the Gulf Stream in very dynamic late-winter conditions. Detailed field observations, along with high-resolution numerical modeling and remote sensing data, revealed a host of intricate mesoscale and submesoscale structures. Data analysis, theoretical work, and numerical simulations continue to elucidate a range of processes at scales of 0.1 to 10 km that lead to lateral mixing and energy transfer. This AMS special collection brings together papers presenting many of the results from this project. The overview article for this collection can be found here.
Collection organizers:
James R. Ledwell
Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Gualtiero Badin
Institute of Oceanography, University of Hamburg
Amala Mahadevan
Department of Physical Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Andrey Shcherbina
Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle
Miles A. Sundermeyer
School for Marine Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Abstracts for all AMS articles are available to everyone, as is the full text of Bulletin articles. Access to full-text HTML and PDF articles in the technical journals is limited to paid subscribers.