Residual Currents Induced by Asymmetric Tidal Mixing in Weakly Stratified Narrow Estuaries

Rías and Tidal-sea Estuaries

Mixing by microorganisms in stratified fluids

We examine the vertical mixing induced by the swimming of microorganisms at low Reynolds and Péclet numbers in a stably stratified ocean, and show that the global contribution of oceanic microswimmers to vertical mixing is negligible. We propose two approaches to estimating the mixing efficiency, η, or the ratio of the rate of potential energy creation to the total rate-of-working on the ocean ...

Residual Exchange Flows in Subtropical Estuaries

Observations of residual exchange flows at the entrance to four subtropical estuaries, two of them semiarid, indicate that these flows are mainly tidally driven, as they compare favorably with theoretical patterns of tidal residual flows. In every estuary examined, the tidal behavior was that of a standing or near-standing wave, i.e., tidal elevation and tidal currents were nearly in quadrature...

Mixing by Tidal Interaction with Sloping Boundaries

The process of mixing by tides interacting with topography involves several stages. First some fraction of the energy contained in the barotropic tide must be converted into baroclinic energy, through the generation of internal tides and turbulent boundary layers. Secondly, the energy in the internal tides must be transmitted into smaller vertical wavelengths, thereby increasing the vertical sh...

Computational Study of a Weakly Compressible Mixing Barrier in Low Prandtl Number, Strongly Stratified Fluids

The effects of weak compressibility in the evolution of a fluid governed by the anelastic fluid equations are explored computationally. The basis for this study is a careful determination of the role which the anelastic divergence constraint plays in the evolution of a periodic array of interacting vortices. Our numerical studies address a blocking phenomenon occurring in strongly stratified fl...