scholarly journals Decomposition of the Multimodal Multidirectional M2 Internal Tide Field

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1157-1173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhongxiang Zhao ◽  
Jinbo Wang ◽  
Dimitris Menemenlis ◽  
Lee-Lueng Fu ◽  
Shuiming Chen ◽  
...  

AbstractThe M2 internal tide field contains waves of various baroclinic modes and various horizontal propagation directions. This paper presents a technique for decomposing the sea surface height (SSH) field of the multimodal multidirectional internal tide. The technique consists of two steps: first, different baroclinic modes are decomposed by two-dimensional (2D) spatial filtering, utilizing their different horizontal wavelengths; second, multidirectional waves in each mode are decomposed by 2D plane wave analysis. The decomposition technique is demonstrated using the M2 internal tide field simulated by the MITgcm. This paper focuses on a region lying off the U.S. West Coast ranging 20°–50°N, 220°–245°E. The lowest three baroclinic modes are separately resolved from the internal tide field; each mode is further decomposed into five waves of arbitrary propagation directions in the horizontal. The decomposed fields yield unprecedented details on the internal tide’s generation and propagation, which cannot be observed in the harmonically fitted field. The results reveal that the mode-1 M2 internal tide in the study region is dominantly from the Hawaiian Ridge to the west but also generated locally at the Mendocino Ridge and continental slope. The mode-2 and mode-3 M2 internal tides are generated at isolated seamounts, as well as at the Mendocino Ridge and continental slope. The Mendocino Ridge radiates both southbound and northbound M2 internal tides for all three modes. Their propagation distances decrease with increasing mode number: mode-1 waves can travel over 2000 km, while mode-3 waves can only be tracked for 300 km. The decomposition technique may be extended to other tidal constituents and to the global ocean.

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (11) ◽  
pp. 3165-3188
Author(s):  
Pengyang Song ◽  
Xueen Chen

AbstractA global ocean circulation and tide model with nonuniform resolution is used in this work to resolve the ocean circulation globally as well as mesoscale eddies and internal tides regionally. Focusing on the northwest Pacific Ocean (NWP, 0°–35°N, 105°–150°E), a realistic experiment is conducted to simulate internal tides considering the background circulation and stratification. To investigate the influence of a background field on the generation and propagation of internal tides, idealized cases with horizontally homogeneous stratification and zero surface fluxes are also implemented for comparison. By comparing the realistic cases with idealized ones, the astronomical tidal forcing is found to be the dominant factor influencing the internal tide conversion rate magnitude, whereas the stratification acts as a secondary factor. However, stratification deviations in different areas can lead to an error exceeding 30% in the local internal tide energy conversion rate, indicating the necessity of a realistic stratification setting for simulating the entire NWP. The background shear is found to refract propagating diurnal internal tides by changing the effective Coriolis frequencies and phase speeds, while the Doppler-shifting effect is remarkable for introducing biases to semidiurnal results. In addition, nonlinear baroclinic tide energy equations considering the background circulation and stratification are derived and diagnosed in this work. The mean flow–baroclinic tide interaction and nonlinear energy flux are the most significant nonlinear terms in the derived equations, and nonlinearity is estimated to contribute approximately 5% of the total internal tide energy in the greater Luzon Strait area.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casimir de Lavergne ◽  
Clément Vic ◽  
Gurvan Madec ◽  
Fabien Roquet ◽  
Amy Waterhouse ◽  
...  

<p>Vertical mixing is often regarded as the Achilles’ heel of ocean models. In particular, few models include a comprehensive and energy-constrained parameterization of mixing by internal ocean tides. Here, we present an energy-conserving mixing scheme which accounts for the local breaking of high-mode internal tides and the distant dissipation of low-mode internal tides. The scheme relies on four static two-dimensional maps of internal tide dissipation, constructed using mode-by-mode Lagrangian tracking of energy beams from sources to sinks. Each map is associated with a distinct dissipative process and a corresponding vertical structure. Applied to an observational climatology of stratification, the scheme produces a global three-dimensional map of dissipation which compares well with available microstructure observations and with upper-ocean finestructure mixing estimates. Implemented in the NEMO global ocean model, the scheme improves the representation of deep water-mass transformation and obviates the need for a constant background diffusivity.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Solano ◽  
Maarten Buijsman

<p>Energy decay in realistically forced global ocean models has been mostly studied in the diurnal and semi-diurnal tidal bands and it is unclear how much of the tidal energy in these bands is scattered to higher frequencies. Global ocean models and satellite altimetry have shown that low-mode internal tides can propagate thousands of kilometers from their generation sites before being dissipated in the ocean interior but their pathway to dissipation is obscured due to lee-wave breaking at generation, wave-wave interactions, topographic scattering, shearing instabilities and shoaling on continental shelves. Internal tides from some generation sites, such as the Amazon shelf and the Nicobar and Andaman island chain, have large amounts of energy resulting in a steepening of the internal waves into solitary wave trains due to non-hydrostatic dispersion. In HYCOM, a hydrostatic model, this process is partially simulated by numerical dispersion. However, it is yet unknown how the dissipation of internal tides is affected by the numerical dispersion in hydrostatic models. In this study we use the method of vertical modes and rotary spectra to quantify the scattering of internal tides to higher-frequencies and analyze the dissipation processes in global HYCOM simulations with 4-km horizontal resolution.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Nazarian ◽  
Christian Burns ◽  
Sonya Legg ◽  
Maarten Buijsman ◽  
Brian Arbic

<p>The breaking of tidally-generated internal gravity waves (hereafter internal tides) is a significant driver of ocean mixing, and observations and model simulations show that a non-negligible amount of this internal tide-driven mixing occurs in submarine canyons. While previous studies have used single observations of canyon mixing to estimate the global magnitude of internal tide-driven mixing within canyons, there is still significant uncertainty in these estimates.</p><p>To address this question, we have constructed an algorithm based on the modelled energy loss in idealized simulations (Nazarian & Legg 2017b) to calculate the magnitude of mixing in each submarine canyon and to determine the percentage of the global internal tide energy budget that is dissipated in canyons. The algorithm utilizes the Harris et al. 2014 analysis of the SRTM30_PLUS global bathymetry map to provide the geometrical properties of each canyon (i.e. height, length, width) and a high-resolution, tidally-forced HYCOM simulation to determine the internal tide field (sea surface height, angle of propagation, stratification, etc.). Preliminary calculations show that the canyon’s geometrical properties as well as local hydrographic properties have significant effects on the magnitude of mixing. Specifically, canyons that are tall relative to the depth of the water column and long relative to the incoming internal tide’s wavelength dissipate approximately 100% of the incoming wave’s energy. Consistent with previous studies, we find that regardless of bathymetry, submarine canyons can dissipate a significant fraction of the incident internal tide energy. Our estimate of the globally-integrated energy dissipation in canyons, taking into account geometric properties of each canyon, is two to three times larger than prior global estimates extrapolated from observations of individual canyons. Furthermore, our research highlights canyon hotspots of internal tide-driven mixing in the global ocean, for which observations do not presently exist. Taken together, these results raise larger questions about the location of internal tide dissipation and the inclusion of such dissipation in global ocean models.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarten Buijsman ◽  
Harpreet Kaur ◽  
Zhongxiang Zhao ◽  
Amy Waterhouse ◽  
Caitlin Whalen

<p>In this presentation we combine several model and observational data sets to better understand the dissipation of the diurnal and semidiurnal internal tide in the global ocean, which is relevant for maintaining the global overturning circulation. We compute depth-integrated internal tide dissipation rates from a realistically-forced global HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) simulation with a horizontal resolution of 4 km (1/25 degrees) and 41 layers. We also compute dissipation rates from altimetry in two ways: 1) from the low-mode flux divergence away from topography and 2) by fitting exponential decay curves along low-mode internal tide beams. The internal-tide sea-surface height amplitude is computed with a least-squares harmonic analysis over a 20+ year altimetry data set. Hence, the altimetry-inferred dissipation rates both reflect the tidal dissipation and the energy scattered from the stationary to the nonstationary internal tide. To account for the dissipation of the nonstationary tide, we apply a spatially-varying correction factor to the stationary dissipation inferred from altimetry.  This correction factor is computed from a global 8-km HYCOM simulation with a duration of 6 years, from which the stationary and nonstationary internal tides can be easily isolated. We compare the simulated and the corrected altimetry-inferred dissipation rates with dissipation rates from finescale and microstructure observations. Preliminary results show that the simulated dissipation is up to a factor of two larger than the depth-integrated dissipation rates inferred from finescale methods, but smaller than the dissipation rates from microstructure.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (10) ◽  
pp. 2479-2498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eiji Masunaga ◽  
Oliver B. Fringer ◽  
Yujiro Kitade ◽  
Hidekatsu Yamazaki ◽  
Scott M. Gallager

AbstractThe generation of trapped and radiating internal tides around Izu‐Oshima Island located off Sagami Bay, Japan, is investigated using the three-dimensional Stanford Unstructured Nonhydrostatic Terrain-following Adaptive Navier–Stokes Simulator (SUNTANS) that is validated with observations of isotherm displacements in shallow water. The model is forced by barotropic tides, which generate strong baroclinic internal tides in the study region. Model results showed that when diurnal K1 barotropic tides dominate, resonance of a trapped internal Kelvin wave leads to large-amplitude internal tides in shallow waters on the coast. This resonance produces diurnal motions that are much stronger than the semidiurnal motions. The weaker, freely propagating, semidiurnal internal tides are generated on the western side of the island, where the M2 internal tide beam angle matches the topographic slope. The internal wave energy flux due to the diurnal internal tides is much higher than that of the semidiurnal tides in the study region. Although the diurnal internal tide energy is trapped, this study shows that steepening of the Kelvin waves produces high-frequency internal tides that radiate from the island, thus acting as a mechanism to extract energy from the diurnal motions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (12) ◽  
pp. 3225-3244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeed Falahat ◽  
Jonas Nycander ◽  
Fabien Roquet ◽  
Moundheur Zarroug

Abstract A direct calculation of the tidal generation of internal waves over the global ocean is presented. The calculation is based on a semianalytical model, assuming that the internal tide characteristic slope exceeds the bathymetric slope (subcritical slope) and the bathymetric height is small relative to the vertical scale of the wave, as well as that the horizontal tidal excursion is smaller than the horizontal topographic scale. The calculation is performed for the M2 tidal constituent. In contrast to previous similar computations, the internal tide is projected onto vertical eigenmodes, which gives two advantages. First, the vertical density profile and the finite ocean depth are taken into account in a fully consistent way, in contrast to earlier work based on the WKB approximation. Nevertheless, the WKB-based total global conversion follows closely that obtained using the eigenmode decomposition in each of the latitudinal and vertical distributions. Second, the information about the distribution of the conversion energy over different vertical modes is valuable, since the lowest modes can propagate over long distances, while high modes are more likely to dissipate locally, near the generation site. It is found that the difference between the vertical distributions of the tidal conversion into the vertical modes is smaller for the case of very deep ocean than the shallow-ocean depth. The results of the present work pave the way for future work on the vertical and horizontal distribution of the mixing caused by internal tides.


2012 ◽  
Vol 588-589 ◽  
pp. 1964-1971
Author(s):  
Li Dan Wu ◽  
Chun Bao Miao

Internal tides generated by the interaction of the barotropic tide with bottom topography are studied by using an analytical solution. Tide-topography resonance takes place when the wavenumber of the truncated sinusoidal topography is equal to that of one baroclinic mode. The minimum amplitude of the resonant mode increases from the center of the domain to both sides of the topography; while the maximum keeps the same. Amplitudes of the internal tides and mode conversion rate are analyzed as a function of the length and wavenumber of the topography. For non-resonant modes, the amplitudes are weak and vary periodically with the extending of the topography, and are exactly zero when the length of topography is integral times of the mode-1 wavelength. For resonant modes, the amplitudes increase with the length of the topography. For each internal tide mode, there is a response zone, where the amplitude for one mode is obviously larger than other baroclinic modes. The response zones for high modes are wider than those for low modes. Mode conversion rate is obviously high when the wavenumber of the topography is equal to that of the baroclinic modes; otherwise it is almost zero. Furthermore, mode conversion rate for small topography wavenumber is more than that for large topography wavenumber with the same number of the sinusoidal topography, and is less with the same topography length.


2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (9) ◽  
pp. 1772-1794 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim I. Martini ◽  
Matthew H. Alford ◽  
Eric Kunze ◽  
Samuel M. Kelly ◽  
Jonathan D. Nash

Abstract A complex superposition of locally forced and shoaling remotely generated semidiurnal internal tides occurs on the Oregon continental slope. Presented here are observations from a zonal line of five profiling moorings deployed across the continental slope from 500 to 3000 m, a 24-h expendable current profiler (XCP) survey, and five 15–48-h lowered ADCP (LADCP)/CTD stations. The 40-day moored deployment spans three spring and two neap tides, during which the proportions of the locally and remotely forced internal tides vary. Baroclinic signals are strong throughout spring and neap tides, with 4–5-day-long bursts of strong cross-slope baroclinic semidiurnal velocity and vertical displacement . Energy fluxes exhibit complex spatial and temporal patterns throughout both tidal periods. During spring tides, local barotropic forcing is strongest and energy flux over the slope is predominantly offshore (westward). During neap tides, shoaling remotely generated internal tides dominate and energy flux is predominantly onshore (eastward). Shoaling internal tides do not exhibit a strong spring–neap cycle and are also observed during the first spring tide, indicating that they originate from multiple sources. The bulk of the remotely generated internal tide is hypothesized to be generated from south of the array (e.g., Mendocino Escarpment), because energy fluxes at the deep mooring 100 km offshore are always directed northward. However, fluxes on the slope suggest that the northbound internal tide is turned onshore, most likely by reflection from large-scale bathymetry. This is verified with a simple three-dimensional model of mode-1 internal tides propagating obliquely onto a near-critical slope, whose output conforms fairly well to observations, in spite of its simplicity.


2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBIN ROBERTSON

Barotropic and baroclinic tides were simulated for the Weddell Sea using ROMS. The model estimates for both tidal elevations and velocities showed good agreement with existing observations. The rms differences were 9 cm for elevations and 1.2–1.7 cm s−1 for the major axes of the tidal ellipses for the semidiurnal constituents and 6–8 cm and 4.5 cm s−1 for the diurnal constituents, respectively. Most of the discrepancies occurred deep under the ice shelf for the semidiurnal tides and along the continental slope for the diurnal tides. Along the continental slope, the model overestimated the generation of diurnal continental shelf waves. The diurnal tides were barotropic throughout the basin. However, internal tides were generated at semidiurnal frequencies over rough topography. Over the continental slope, semidiurnal baroclinic tidal generation was enhanced by the existence of continental shelf waves, through their harmonics. Baroclinic tides generated over rough topography in the northern Weddell Sea incited inertial oscillations as they propagated south. These inertial oscillations varied with depth since they were incited at different depths at different times as the internal tide progressed. Both the baroclinic tides and inertial oscillations induced vertical shear in the water column and increased the divergence of the horizontal surface velocities.


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