The LatMix Summer Campaign: Submesoscale Stirring in the Upper Ocean
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Callies, Joern; Ferrari, Raffaele![Thumbnail](/bitstream/handle/1721.1/101395/Shcherbina-2015-The%20LatMix%20Summer%20Ca.pdf.jpg?sequence=4&isAllowed=y)
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Lateral stirring is a basic oceanographic phenomenon affecting the distribution of physical, chemical, and biological fields. Eddy stirring at scales on the order of 100 km (the mesoscale) is fairly well understood and explicitly represented in modern eddy-resolving numerical models of global ocean circulation. The same cannot be said for smaller-scale stirring processes. Here, the authors describe a major oceanographic field experiment aimed at observing and understanding the processes responsible for stirring at scales of 0.1–10 km. Stirring processes of varying intensity were studied in the Sargasso Sea eddy field approximately 250 km southeast of Cape Hatteras. Lateral variability of water-mass properties, the distribution of microscale turbulence, and the evolution of several patches of inert dye were studied with an array of shipboard, autonomous, and airborne instruments. Observations were made at two sites, characterized by weak and moderate background mesoscale straining, to contrast different regimes of lateral stirring. Analyses to date suggest that, in both cases, the lateral dispersion of natural and deliberately released tracers was O(1) m[superscript 2] s[superscript –1] as found elsewhere, which is faster than might be expected from traditional shear dispersion by persistent mesoscale flow and linear internal waves. These findings point to the possible importance of kilometer-scale stirring by submesoscale eddies and nonlinear internal-wave processes or the need to modify the traditional shear-dispersion paradigm to include higher-order effects. A unique aspect of the Scalable Lateral Mixing and Coherent Turbulence (LatMix) field experiment is the combination of direct measurements of dye dispersion with the concurrent multiscale hydrographic and turbulence observations, enabling evaluation of the underlying mechanisms responsible for the observed dispersion at a new level.
Date issued
2015-08Department
Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences; Woods Hole Oceanographic InstitutionJournal
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
Shcherbina, Andrey Y., Miles A. Sundermeyer, Eric Kunze, Eric D’Asaro, Gualtiero Badin, Daniel Birch, Anne-Marie E. G. Brunner-Suzuki, et al. “The LatMix Summer Campaign: Submesoscale Stirring in the Upper Ocean.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 96, no. 8 (August 2015): 1257–1279. © 2015 American Meteorological Society
Version: Final published version
ISSN
0003-0007
1520-0477