Scales, Growth Rates, and Spectral Fluxes of Baroclinic Instability in the Ocean

By R. Tulloch, John Marshall, Chris N. Hill. 2011

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

AbstractAn observational, modeling, and theoretical study of the scales, growth rates, and spectral fluxes of baroclinic instability in the ocean is presented, permitting a discussion of the relation between the local instability scale; the first baroclinic deformation scale Rdef; and the equilibrated, observed eddy scale. The geography of the large-scale, meridional quasigeostrophic potential vorticity (QGPV) gradient is mapped out using a climatological atlas, and attention is drawn to asymmetries between midlatitude eastward currents and subtropical return flows, the latter of which has westward and eastward zonal velocity shears. A linear stability analysis of the climatology, under the “local approximation,” yields the growth rates and scales of the fastest-growing modes. Fastest-growing modes on eastward-flowing currents, such as the Kuroshio and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, have a scale somewhat larger (by a factor of about 2) than Rdef. They are rapidly growing (e folding in 1–3 weeks) and d...

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/676bb77737633f2d50337d951a8c20d3815af7b8

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Citations in the corpus

Mesoscale to submesoscale wavenumber spectra in Drake Passage (2016, unknown): “strong baroclinic stretching term associated with the mean vertical shear dominates the quasigeostrophic potential vorticity (QGPV) gradient (e.g., Tulloch et al. 2011).”
Suppression of Eddy Diffusivity across Jets in the Southern Ocean (2010, background): “Observations (e.g., Orsi et al. 1995; Tulloch et al. 2009a, manuscript submitted to J. Phys.”
Mapping the Energy Cascade in the North Atlantic Ocean: The Coarse-Graining Approach (2017, methodology): “fore applying FFTs. One standard method in signal processing is periodizing the domain, such that the box is re ected eight times around the original, resulting in a \super-box" that is periodic Tulloch et al. (2011). Another standard method is to smoothly taper the data to zero near the edges ”