Search Results

You are looking at 1 - 1 of 1 items for :

  • Author or Editor: Eric D’Asaro x
  • LatMix: Studies of Submesoscale Stirring and Mixing x
  • Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society x
  • Refine by Access: All Content x
Clear All Modify Search
Andrey Y. Shcherbina
,
Miles A. Sundermeyer
,
Eric Kunze
,
Eric D’Asaro
,
Gualtiero Badin
,
Daniel Birch
,
Anne-Marie E. G. Brunner-Suzuki
,
Jörn Callies
,
Brandy T. Kuebel Cervantes
,
Mariona Claret
,
Brian Concannon
,
Jeffrey Early
,
Raffaele Ferrari
,
Louis Goodman
,
Ramsey R. Harcourt
,
Jody M. Klymak
,
Craig M. Lee
,
M.-Pascale Lelong
,
Murray D. Levine
,
Ren-Chieh Lien
,
Amala Mahadevan
,
James C. McWilliams
,
M. Jeroen Molemaker
,
Sonaljit Mukherjee
,
Jonathan D. Nash
,
Tamay Özgökmen
,
Stephen D. Pierce
,
Sanjiv Ramachandran
,
Roger M. Samelson
,
Thomas B. Sanford
,
R. Kipp Shearman
,
Eric D. Skyllingstad
,
K. Shafer Smith
,
Amit Tandon
,
John R. Taylor
,
Eugene A. Terray
,
Leif N. Thomas
, and
James R. Ledwell

Abstract

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) m2 s–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.

Full access