The dynamics of El Niño–SouthernOscillation (ENSO) are studied in terms of the balance between energy input from the winds (via wind power) and changes in the storage of available potential energy in the tropical ocean. Presently, there are broad differences in the way global general circulation models simulate the dynamics, magnitude, and phase of ENSO events; hence, there is a need for simple...

[1] The influence of turbulent ocean mixing transcends its inherently small scales to affect large scale ocean processes including water-mass transformation, stratification maintenance, and the overturning circulation. However, the distribution of ocean mixing is not well described by sparse ship-based observations since this mixing is both spatially patchy and temporally intermittent. We use s...

The process of mixing by tides interacting with topography involves several stages. First some fraction of the energy contained in the barotropic tide must be converted into baroclinic energy, through the generation of internal tides and turbulent boundary layers. Secondly, the energy in the internal tides must be transmitted into smaller vertical wavelengths, thereby increasing the vertical sh...

changes in sea ice thickness and the relative amounts of open water on surface air temperatures through the year. Figure 2 shows that the impact on the surface air temperatures is rather small during the summer; however, during the winter, when there is a large difference between the surface temperature of ocean water and of sea ice, the impact of small changes in the area of open ocean on surf...

Marine phytoplankton and associated organic materials absorb a substantial quantity of solar shortwave energy penetrating the upper ocean. Most of this absorbed energy is lost as heat and thereby contributes to the warming of near-surface waters. Here we examine this biothermal feedback effect on upper ocean physics and air-sea energy exchange using a fully integrated ocean-atmosphere-biologica...

The long term goal of this project is to provide a new set of parameterizations of air-sea fluxes, which can be used as boundary conditions for high-resolution numerical models of ocean, atmosphere, and coupled ocean/atmosphere systems. The new parameterizations will be constructed based on physical processes of the exchange of mass, momentum, heat, moisture, energy at the interface between the...

Ocean thermal structure is critical for the intensity change of tropical cyclones (TCs). It has been operationally derived from satellite altimetry for TC forecasting and research. The existing derivation is, however, based on a simple two-layer method; as a result, only two isotherms can be obtained to coarsely characterize the subsurface ocean thermal structure. Improvement on the vertical re...

The long term goal of this project is to provide a new set of parameterizations of air-sea fluxes, which can be used as boundary conditions for high-resolution numerical models of ocean, atmosphere, and coupled ocean/atmosphere systems. The new parameterizations will be constructed based on physical processes of the exchange of mass, momentum, heat, moisture, energy at the interface between the...