A Simple Approach for Disentangling Vortical and Wavy Motions of Oceanic Flows

Abstract A long-standing challenge in dynamical oceanography is to distinguish nonlinearly intermingled regimes of oceanic flows. Conventional approaches focus on time-scale or space-scale decomposition. Here, we pursue a dynamics-based decomposition, where mean flow introduced extend the classic theory wavy and vortical modes. Mainly based relative magnitudes vorticity modified horizontal divergence spectral space, full decomposed into motions. The proposed approach proves simple efficient can be used particularly for online disentangling motions simulated flows by ever-popular tide-resolving high-resolution numerical models. This approach, combined with conventional time-scale- space-scale-based approaches, paves way mixing parameterizations using model (for isopycnal mixing) diapycnal understanding multiregime multiscale interactions