Collaborative Research: The Internal Wave Spectrum and Boundary Mixing in the Sub-Tropical South Atlantic

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The research will examine the capability of global scale Ocean Circulation Models (OCMs) to represent internal gravity waves, their dynamics and mixing with characterizing the oceanic internal wavefield at regional scales through a targeted field campaign and numerical investigations. The project will obtain new observations through a field campaign and targeted numerical simulations and will leverage existing data. This project is jointly funded by NSF and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) through the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP).A moored array will be deployed in the Brazil Basin to quantify near boundary flow distortions due to finite amplitude topography, near boundary internal wave breaking, and momentum and buoyancy fluxes in both turbulent and internal wavebands. Extant data obtained as part of a Tracer Release Experiment in the same domain and data from the Global Drifter Program will be used to create a regional statistical characterization of the oceanic internal wavefield in the Sub-Tropical South Atlantic. This characterization will be compared to a hierarchy of five models: an operational forecast model (HYCOM), O(1-3) km horizontal resolution ROMS-CROCO, a nonhydrostatic ROMS-CROCO ’mountain scale’ simulations with 50 m resolution, a realistic Large Eddy Simulations (LES), and a quasi-analytic spectral representation of the internal wave energy spectrum.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.