IAPSO/SCOR Conference on Ocean Mixing

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Intellectual Merit: Understanding of ocean mixing processes is important for large-scale ocean circulation. A quantitative as well as a qualitative understanding of the interactions among winds and currents, internal waves, seafloor topography and roughness, stratification, and mixing is developing rapidly following a number of process experiments. Interest has heightened over the past few years in tidal interactions with seafloor topography and the ensuing impacts on ocean mixing. This interest stems in part from recent analytical and field results indicating that these interactions can contribute a significant portion of the energy needed to force mixing in ocean basins remote from physical boundaries. A full understanding of this mechanism may enhance our ability to parameterize mixing processes that occur at spatial scales smaller than the grid scales typifying even eddy-resolving ocean general circulation models. This international conference, proposed by a Working Group on Ocean Mixing of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) will bring together the leading scientists in the field of ocean mixing to serve as a mechanism for the IAPSO/SCOR working group to gather information on recent findings, difficulties involved with parameterization of mixing in numerical ocean models and future directions and opportunities..Broader Impacts: Improved parameterization schemes may decrease the long-standing, order-of-magnitude disagreement between (1) mixing intensity needed in order for models to behave properly and (2) mixing measured in the ocean. Such improvements in model parameterizations should allow modelers to produce models whose results agree better with observations and result in more accurate and precise predictions of the effects of the ocean on global change. Thus, the proposed activity could have important societal impacts. The findings of the confer3ence will be summarized in a special issue of Deep-Sea Research II that will document the state of the field and make information from the conference available more broadly to physical oceanographers and other ocean scientists who are unable to attend the conference