Continuous acoustic travel-time measurements from a two-dimensional array of pressure-gauge-equipped inverted echo sounders spanning the entire Ulleung Basin of the southwestern Japan/East Sea between June 1999 and July 2001 are used to examine the upper temperature and current patterns. A new method, referred to as the Residual GEM Technique, interprets the travel-time data into a three-dimens...

The modeling of the atmospheric boundary layer during convective conditions has long been a major source of uncertainty in the numerical modeling of meteorological conditions and air quality. Much of the difficulty stems from the large range of turbulent scales that are effective in the convective boundary layer (CBL). Both small-scale turbulence that is subgrid in most mesoscale grid models an...

Along various stretches of the Antarctic margins, dense Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) escapes its formation sites and descends the continental slope. This export necessarily raises the isopycnals associated with lighter density classes over the continental slope, resulting in density surfaces that connect the near-freezing waters of the continental shelf to the much warmer CDW at mid-depth offs...

Two approaches for closing the turbulence subgrid-scale stress tensor in terms of matrix exponentials are introduced and compared. The first approach is based on a formal solution of the stress transport equation in which the production terms can be integrated exactly in terms of matrix exponentials. This formal solution of the subgrid-scale stress transport equation is shown to be useful to ex...

A generic model for advection of a scalar by E 3 B flow with a linearly varying mean shows that the cross phase factor in the transport flux is strongly reduced in the strong shear regime (shearing rate . eddy turnover rate), leading to significant transport suppression. The cross phase scales much more strongly with shear strength than do fluctuation amplitudes, allowing significant transport ...

In the Gulf of Alaska (GOA), mesoscale eddies play an important role in promoting off-shelf transport of heat, nutrients and biological populations into the HNLC water of the northeast Pacific Ocean. However, the spatial and temporal distribution of these eddies and their characteristics have not been substantially described. Here we apply an objective method (Okubo–Weiss parameter) for identif...

The strength of the equinoctial Hadley circulation (HC) is investigated in idealized simulations conducted on an equatorial beta plane in which the zonal width of the domain is varied to either permit or suppress large-scale eddies. The presence of such eddies is found to amplify the HC by a factor of 2–3 in simulations with slab-ocean boundary conditions or with a simple representation of ocea...

Models of Titan ionospheric chemistry have shown that ion densities depend strongly on the neutral composition. The turbulent diffusion transport conditions, as modeled by eddy coefficients, can spectacularly affect the uncertainty on predicted neutral densities. In order to evaluate the error budget on ion densities predicted by photochemical models, we perform uncertainty propagation of neutr...