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A New Look At Richardson Number Mixing Schemes For Equatorial Ocean Modeling, Edward D. Zaron, James N. Moum

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A reexamination of turbulence dissipation measurements from the equatorial Pacific shows that the turbulence diffusivities are not a simple function of the gradient Richardson number. A widely used mixing scheme, the K-profile parameterization, overpredicts the turbulent vertical heat flux by roughly a factor of 4 in the stably stratified region between the surface mixed layer and the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC). Additionally, the heat flux divergence is of the incorrect sign in the upper 80 m. An alternative class of parameterizations is examined that expresses the mixing coefficients in terms of the large-scale kinetic energy, shear, and Richardson number. These representations …