Submesoscale currents in the ocean
By James C. McWilliams. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2016
954 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article is a perspective on the recently discovered realm of submesoscale currents in the ocean. They are intermediate-scale flow structures in the form of density fronts and filaments, topographic wakes and persistent coherent vortices at the surface and throughout the interior. They are created from mesoscale eddies and strong currents, and they provide a dynamical conduit for energy transfer towards microscale dissipation and diapycnal mixing. Consideration is given to their generation mechanisms, instabilities, life cycles, disruption of approximately diagnostic force balance (e.g. geostrophy), turbulent cascades, internal-wave interactions, and transport and dispersion of materials. At a fundamental level, more questions remain than answers, implicating a programme for further research.
Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf15f4c2681dd2e95a0f8c9640a90897b3f731fd
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In Earth-Surface Processes
In Oceanography
Citations in the corpus
- Seasonality of submesoscale dynamics in the Kuroshio Extension (2016, background): “In late winter/early spring the vorticity is strongly positively skewed, whereas the divergence is moderately negatively skewed (convergence/downwelling) as predicted by frontogenesis [e.g., McWilliams, 2016].”