Wave–vortex decomposition of one-dimensional ship-track data
By O. Bühler, J. Callies, Raffaele Ferrari. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2014
139 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract We present a simple two-step method by which one-dimensional spectra of horizontal velocity and buoyancy measured along a ship track can be decomposed into a wave component consisting of inertia–gravity waves and a vortex component consisting of a horizontal flow in geostrophic balance. The method requires certain assumptions for the data regarding stationarity, homogeneity, and horizontal isotropy. In the first step an exact Helmholtz decomposition of the horizontal velocity spectra into rotational and divergent components is performed and in the second step an energy equipartition property of hydrostatic inertia–gravity waves is exploited that allows a diagnosis of the wave energy spectrum solely from the observed horizontal velocities. The observed buoyancy spectrum can then be used to compute the residual vortex energy spectrum. Further wave–vortex decompositions of the observed fields are possible if additional information about the frequency content of the waves is available. We illustrate the method on two recent oceanic data sets from the North Pacific and the Gulf Stream. Notably, both steps in our new method might be of broader use in the theoretical and observational study of atmosphere and ocean fluid dynamics.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3bc4dcc26de1f730aad9caf8ccf27deaf2320228
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Citations in the corpus
- Seasonality of submesoscale dynamics in the Kuroshio Extension (2016, background): “Contemporary studies have also shown that inertia-gravity waves (IGWs) contribute significantly to the near-surface variability at submesoscales [Richman et al., 2012; Bühler et al., 2014; Rocha et al., 2016], but their seasonality has not been investigated.”
- Mesoscale to submesoscale wavenumber spectra in Drake Passage (2016, unknown): “Thus, while all these assumptions are not strictly true, it is unlikely that the B ü hler et al. (2014) decomposition is misleading, particularly in the low-and high-wavenumber ends of the spectrum where geo-strophic flows and inertia–gravity waves dominate, respectively.”