15 June 2017: FB1 seminar

15:00, lecture hall west, Düsternbrooker Weg 20

Abstract:

The upper equatorial oceans provide a natural laboratory for the study of turbulence in stratified, parallel shear flows. The combination of steady trade winds and vanishing Coriolis acceleration leads to persistent, sheared currents, and thereby supports a turbulence regime that is roughly in equilibrium with its forcing - the so-called "deep cycle" of equatorial turbulence. The downward heat flux carried by this turbulence is a critical element of the equatorial climate system and is notoriously difficult to represent in climate models.

In this talk I’ll describe the discovery of the deep cycle in the equatorial Pacific in the 1980s together with efforts to explain its physics, including our current understanding and its implications for stratified shear flows in general (e.g. estuarine flows, gravity currents). Recent evidence for the Atlantic deep cycle will also be described.;

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