Highly resolved pressure measurements on the seafloor over New Jersey’s continental shelf reveal the pressure signature of nonlinear internal waves of depression as negative pressure perturbations. The sign of the perturbation is determined by the dominance of the internal hydrostatic pressure (p⁰Wh) due to isopycnal displacement over the contributions of...
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, J. N., and J. D. Nash, 2008: Seafloor pressure measurements of nonlinear internal waves. J. Phys
Highly resolved pressure measurements on the seafloor over New Jersey’s continental shelf reveal the pressure signature of nonlinear internal waves of depression as negative pressure perturbations. The sign of the perturbation is determined by the dominance of the internal hydrostatic pressure (p⁰Wh) due to isopycnal displacement over the contributions of...
Full Text:
. MOUM AND J. D. NASH
College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis
Vaned, internally recording instruments that measure temperature fluctuations using FP07 thermistors, including fluctuations in the turbulence wavenumber band, have been built, tested, and deployed on a Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) mooring at 0°, 140°W. These were supplemented with motion packages that measure linear accelerations, from which an assessment of cable...
Recent turbulence measurements over a small bank on the continental shelf off Oregon reveal a previously undetected site for intense mixing of the coastal ocean. The flow is hydraulically controlled and turbulence diffusivities over the bank are more than 100 times greater than estimates made on the shelf away from...
Highly resolved pressure measurements on the seafloor over New Jersey’s continental shelf reveal the pressure signature of nonlinear internal waves of depression as negative pressure perturbations. The sign of the perturbation is determined by the dominance of the internal hydrostatic pressure (p⁰Wh) due to isopycnal displacement over the contributions of...
Internal‐tide generation is usually predicted from local topography, surface tides, and stratification. However, internal tides are often observed to be unrelated to local spring‐neap forcing, appearing intermittently in 3–5 day bursts. Here we suggest a source of this intermittency by illustrating how remotely‐generated shoaling internal tides induce first‐order changes in...
Direct numerical simulations are used to compare turbulent diffusivities of heat and salt during the growth and collapse of Kelvin–Helmholtz billows. The ratio of diffusivities is obtained as a function of buoyancy Reynolds number Re[subscript]b and of the density ratio R[subscript]ρ (the ratio of the contributions of heat and salt...
Narrowband oscillations observed in the upper equatorial Pacific are interpreted in terms of a random ensemble of shear instability events. Linear perturbation analysis is applied to hourly averaged profiles of velocity and density over a 54-day interval, yielding a total of 337 unstable modes. Composite profiles of mean states and...
Shoreward propagating, mode 2 nonlinear waves appear sporadically in mooring records obtained off the coast of New Jersey in the summer of 2006. Individual mode 2 packets were tracked between two moorings separated by 1 km; however, packets could not be tracked between moorings separated by greater distances from one...
The energetics of large amplitude, high-frequency nonlinear internal waves (NLIWs) observed over the New Jersey continental shelf are summarized from ship and mooring data acquired in August 2006. NLIW energy was typically on the order of 10⁵ Jm⁻¹, and the wave dissipative loss was near 50 W m⁻¹. However, wave...