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SEMINAR: MPO Special Seminar: Dr. Shane Keating, Tuesday, February 22, at 3:00 p.m., in S/A 103, Slab Seminar Room

From: Sandrine Apelbaum <sapelbaum@rsmas.miami.edu>
Subject: SEMINAR: MPO Special Seminar: Dr. Shane Keating, Tuesday, February 22, at 3:00 p.m., in S/A 103, Slab Seminar Room
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:13:56 -0500

MPO Special Seminar


Dr. Shane Keating
 
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences


"Models and Measures of Mixing in Mesoscale Ocean Turbulence"


Room: S/A 103, Slab Seminar Room

Date: Tuesday, February 22 , at 3:00 p.m.




abstract:
The crucial role of the Ocean in regulating the rate and intensity of climate change reinforces the need for a detailed understanding of turbulent mixing of heat, salinity, and carbon by ocean eddies. The challenges are significant, however: oceanic turbulence is difficult to observe, and oceanic General Circulation Models must parameterize subgrid transport, a notoriously difficult problem in inhomogeneous, anisotropic flows dominated by coherent structures such as jets and vortices. As such, the problem of effectively diagnosing and parameterizing these processes remains a critical limitation on our ability to accurately model oceanic tracer transport.

In this talk, I will discuss ongoing research into several aspects of the ocean mixing problem. First, I will discuss the role of model error in altimetric velocities due to limited spatial and temporal resolution. In particular, we assess model error in a range of Eulerian and Lagrangian diagnostics of lateral mixing and stirring obtained using coarse-grained observations of mesoscale ocean turbulence. Next, we examine a suite of cheap, skillful, and robust new turbulence filters for estimating eddy fluxes from sparse, noisy satellite observations. By extracting high-wavenumber information aliased into the low wavenumber band, one can derive ``superresolved'' velocity fields, increasing the effective resolution of altimetric maps by a factor of four or more. Finally, I will describe efforts to develop parameterization schemes for tracer mixing by oceanic mesoscale turbulence. These include rigorous approaches based on homogenization theory, as well as adaptive stochastic schemes that efficiently parameterize unresolved scales with a model that can be learned ``on-the-fly'' from satellite observations.



Sandrine Apelbaum
Meteorology and Physical Oceanography 
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science
University of Miami
4600 Rickenbacker Causeway
Miami, FL 33149-1098
Tel     (305) 421-4057
Fax     (305) 421-4696