Oceans at MIT

Striving to understand, harness and sustain Earth's defining frontier.

http://oceans.mit.edu

America/New_York

20171105T020000 -0400 -0500 20181104T020000 EST 20180311T020000 -0500 -0400 EDT a0cjs9f8f6q551t8rifnp5lb3c@google.com 20180503T094052Z MIT Seminar | PAOC Oceanography and Climate Sack Lunch The vertical structure of ocean eddies Since we began observing the ocean surface with satellites, it's been of interest to understand how the surface fields reflect motion at depth. A series of recent modeling studies suggest the vertical structure is fairly well-captured by a single mode, intensified near the surface and decaying to zero with depth. A study of 69 globally-distributed current meters supports this, in many locations outside of the tropics. The reason for the dominance of a surface is explored theoretically, using a simple two layer model. The latter predicts a wavenumber frequency spectra which resembles that in the ocean, except at small scales. The latter are shown to be more likely to transfer energy to large scales, leaving the (non-dispersive) large scale waves in tact. A similar conclusion was made previously from idealized numerical experiments. 20161122T120000 20161122T130000 54-915 0

SLS – Joe Lacasce (University of Oslo)