Estimates of Ocean Macroturbulence: Structure Function and Spectral Slope from Argo Profiling Floats
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McCaffrey-2015-Estimates of ocean m.pdf
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Author(s)
McCaffrey, Katherine
Fox-Kemper, Baylor
Forget, Gael
Date Issued
July 2015
Journal
Journal of Physical Oceanography
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
McCaffrey, Katherine, Baylor Fox-Kemper, and Gael Forget. “Estimates of Ocean Macroturbulence: Structure Function and Spectral Slope from Argo Profiling Floats.” Journal of Physical Oceanography 45, no. 7 (July 2015): 1773–1793. © 2015 American Meteorological Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The Argo profiling float network has repeatedly sampled much of the World Ocean. This study uses Argo temperature and salinity data to form the tracer structure function of ocean variability at the macroscale (10–1000 km, mesoscale and above). Here, second-order temperature and salinity structure functions over horizontal separations are calculated along either pressure or potential density surfaces, which allows analysis of both active and passive tracer structure functions. Using Argo data, a map of global variance is created from the climatological average and each datum. When turbulence is homogeneous, the structure function slope from Argo can be related to the wavenumber spectrum slope in ocean temperature or salinity variability. This first application of structure function techniques to Argo data gives physically meaningful results based on bootstrapped confidence intervals, showing geographical dependence of the structure functions with slopes near ⅔ on average, independent of depth.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-14-0023.1
