Collaborative Research: Representing internal-wave driven mixing in global ocean models

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The goal of this Climate Process Team is to formulate and test parameterizations for internal wave mixing in the ocean interior for inclusion in state of the art coupled climate models. Mixing by internal waves is thought to be a primary mechanism governing the overall thermohaline structure of the oceans, and may have significant implications for climate variability. The project promises to reduce the uncertainty in climate prediction associated with the smallest scale physical processes that cannot be explicitly solved by climate models. The project will address three aspects of ocean mixing: near field mixing at internal wave generation sites, mixing due to breakdown of internal wave energy transported in the wave field, and far field mixing due to breakdown of internal wave energy away from sources. Parameterizations will be based on data-based relations for wave physics, radiation balance theory, and results from process models. In addition to be being based on sound theoretical ideas, the parameterizations will also be based on observational results from the growing data set of microstructure observations.