Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 10 Issue 03

View Issue TOC
Volume 10, No. 3
Pages 111 - 115

OpenAccess

Quantifying Vertical Fluxes from Turbulence in the Ocean

By J.N. Moum  
Jump to
Citation Copyright & Usage
First Paragraph

Turbulence represents the smallest scales of the oceanic flowfield, ranging from the order of 1 mm diffusive scales to eddy scales on the order of 1 m in the thermocline, to 10 m in the wind-mixed upper ocean, and to 100 m in the most energetic tidal mixing or convectively mixing flows. Although models of the general circulation cannot possibly resolve the scales of turbulence, its effects must be accounted for. This is because turbulence is the primary agent for irreversibly mixing mass, heat, nutrients and other scalar properties important to the ocean’s stratification, to its lifeforms, and to its ability to rid itself of pollutants. By stretching material surfaces, turbulence acts to enhance concentration gradients so that molecular diffusion can proceed rapidly enough to play a role in the large-scale, irreversible redistribution of properties.

Citation

Moum, J.N. 1997. Quantifying vertical fluxes from turbulence in the ocean. Oceanography 10(3):111–115, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1997.02.

Copyright & Usage

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.