All Climate Events

Wednesday, February 13, 2019. 12:00PM. Energy Pathways & Cascades in both Scale and Space: Ocean Applications. Hussein Aluie, University of Rochester. Sponsored by NOAA GFDL. More information here.

Large-scale currents and eddies pervade the ocean and play a prime role in the general circulation and climate. The coupling between scales ranging from $O(10^4)$ km down to $O(1)$ mm presents a major difficulty in understanding, modeling, and predicting oceanic circulation and mixing, where our constraints on the energy budget suffer from large uncertainties. To this end, we have developed a coarse-graining (or filtering) framework for analyzing the multi-scale dynamics on the sphere. This is made possible by ensuring that our filtering operators and spatial derivatives on the sphere commute, thereby allowing us to derive the PDEs governing any sets of scales. I will demonstrate the application of this framework to satellite altimetry data and to strongly eddying high-resolution simulations using General Circulation Models.