Collaborative Research: Observing turbulent fluxes in the upper Arctic Ocean

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Funds are provided to obtain direct microstructure measurements to accurately constrain the turbulent heat and salt fluxes in the upper Arctic Ocean and to deploy a combination of moored and towed-body measurement devices to develop a dynamical understanding that relates those fluxes to local internal wave and mesoscale features. The proposed cruise will be bracketed at both ends by ¡­ 400 kilometer horizontal sections across the Beaufort Gyre (BG) with the towed body instrument, SWIMS. This will provide an unprecedented 0.5 km horizontal resolution snapshot of temperature, salinity, velocity, and scalar microstructure across the ice free Arctic. Time series at select locations with a tethered microstructure profiler will provide detailed and high frequency estimates of the turbulent mixing rate in relation to unfolding wave breaking events. Finally, a mooring placed in the center of the BG will provide temporal context to interpret other measurements. Analysis will focus on 1) quantifying mixing rates, 2) understanding how near-inertial internal wave propagation and breaking respond to variable forcing rates and refraction by mesoscale vorticity, and 3) evaluating several candidate dynamical relationships between the two with an eye towards parameterization.Broader impacts of the project include support for the training of a graduate student and for an early career scientist. Furthermore, the proposed development of a public lecture through the Birch Aquarium¡¯s Perspectives on Ocean Science series, with subsequent web-based delivery of the video has the potential to reach a large lay audience. The Arctic Ocean is logistically difficult and expensive to observe. Thus, much of our detailed understanding of the Arctic Ocean and its variability is likely to be provided by models for the foreseeable future. Our faith in the output of such models increases in proportion to our ability to include unresolved processes through parameterizations. Mixing is one of the most important of these processes. This project, if successful, will contribute to the accurate parameterization of mixing in these models, with consequent improvement of predictions of weather and climate, stratification in the ocean, the heat flux to the ocean surface, and primary production that drives the oceanic food chain.