Spatial and temporal variability of internal wave-driven mixing in the Arctic Ocean ...

• Main Author: Chanona, Melanie
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Climate change
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0389888; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0389888

The Arctic Ocean is a unique oceanographic environment that sits at the frontier of the impacts of climate change. In light of the ongoing dramatic changes observed in the Arctic Ocean, there has been a growing interest in improving our understanding of turbulent ocean mixing rates, which play an integral role in setting numerous oceanographic properties. However, scarcity of direct turbulence measurements in the Arctic Ocean inhibits our ability to robustly quantify the space-time variability of mixing in this region and understand the mechanisms that underpin it. This thesis addresses this issue by employing a finescale parameterization of turbulent dissipation to estimate turbulent mixing metrics from three unique Arctic Ocean datasets that span a wide range of distinct space and time scales. Key results include the following. First, estimated internal wave-driven dissipation rates span multiple orders of magnitude, both across large geographic domains and temporally on local scales. Despite this wide ...