Workshop On Ocean Mixing: Recent results and future prospects from combining process studies, theory and numerical modeling approaches; Scripps Inst.; Oct.27-29, 2015

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Turbulent mixing is a crucial driver of heat and nutrient and current distributions through the world oceans. Away from direct atmospheric surface forcing, most of the turbulent mixing in the ocean interior is driven by breaking internal gravity waves. Global levels and patterns of mixing are hence set by the detailed geography of internal wave generation, propagation and breaking. The NSF-funded Climate Process Team (CPT) on ocean mixing has been working for the past five years to develop, implement, test and refine new parameterizations of diapycnal (vertical) mixing for use in global ocean and coupled climate models. In particular, the CPT has concentrated on turbulent mixing due to breaking internal waves, including internal tides, wind-driven near-inertial internal waves, and more recently, internal lee waves. In all cases the diverse membership of the CPT, consisting of sea-going observationalists, theorists, those doing numerical process studies, and members of two national modeling centers, has allowed multi-faceted approaches to tackling these issues. Thirty to forty participants are expected for this workshop, including a few international scientists and a good number of early career scientists. This workshop will further our ability to understand and improve the veracity of the ocean component of climate models. Improved climate models will benefit many fields within oceanography, as well as the ability for society as a whole to anticipate and adapt to a changing climate as effectively as possible.The workshop has multiple goals. The first goal is to pull together the collective state of knowledge from both the members of the Climate Process Team on Ocean Mixing and invited participants on topics including the global geography of diapycnal mixing, associated global energy budgets, the net influence and model sensitivity to the different processes, and best practice tools and techniques that span multiple process experiments. Intensive working time will allow for active collaboration between participants working on similar problems. Finally, participants will reconvene to identify issues that need concentrated work, steps forward, and step back to consider the most interesting and important open questions for the field as a whole in the decade to come. Three clear outcomes are anticipated: a reenergized level of communication and understanding within the active turbulent mixing community; the dissemination of several products for broad community use, including the microstructure observations database, the CVMIX repository of code modules, and a best practices website of commonly used observational analysis techniques and a whitepaper summarizing our collective state of the field knowledge.