Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Structure and résumé
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Heat, buoyancy, instability and turbulence
- 2 Neutral stability: internal waves
- 3 Instability and transition to turbulence in stratified shear flows
- 4 Convective instabilities
- 5 Instability and breaking of internal waves in mid-water
- 6 The measurement of turbulence and mixing
- 7 Fine-structure, transient-structures, and turbulence in the pycnocline
- 8 The benthic boundary layer
- 9 The upper ocean boundary layer
- 10 Shallow seas
- 11 Boundary layers on beaches and submarine slopes
- 12 Topographically related turbulence
- 13 Large-scale waves, eddies and dispersion
- 14 Epilogue
- Appendices
- References
- Index of laboratory experiments
- Subject index
- Plate section
12 - Topographically related turbulence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Structure and résumé
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Heat, buoyancy, instability and turbulence
- 2 Neutral stability: internal waves
- 3 Instability and transition to turbulence in stratified shear flows
- 4 Convective instabilities
- 5 Instability and breaking of internal waves in mid-water
- 6 The measurement of turbulence and mixing
- 7 Fine-structure, transient-structures, and turbulence in the pycnocline
- 8 The benthic boundary layer
- 9 The upper ocean boundary layer
- 10 Shallow seas
- 11 Boundary layers on beaches and submarine slopes
- 12 Topographically related turbulence
- 13 Large-scale waves, eddies and dispersion
- 14 Epilogue
- Appendices
- References
- Index of laboratory experiments
- Subject index
- Plate section
Summary
Introduction
There is accumulating evidence, some of it described in Sections 1.9 and 7.5, that rough topography is an important factor in ocean mixing. In many of the theoretical and laboratory investigations of its effect on mixing, topography is represented by very simplified geometry such as a sinusoidal ‘roughness’ or the smooth slopes of Chapter 11. In reality the floor of the ocean in many regions is very irregular, and often not known to the resolution required for prediction of its effect on the dynamics of the overlying flow. It is nevertheless possible to identify some generic features of topography and to characterize the flow in their vicinity. The further step of parametrizing turbulence and its dissipation in terms of some gross measures of topography is incomplete but one receiving considerable attention. For that reason, whilst this chapter will review some of what is known of the effects of topography, it falls well short of describing the consequent turbulence in terms that can be applied to obtain reliable quantitative estimates of dissipation rates in ocean basins.
Headlands, promontories and curved coastlines
Flow past headlands often results in eddies being formed on the lee side. D'Asaro (1988), for example, suggests that of eddy shedding around promontories in the Beaufort Gyre region of the Arctic is a source of sub-mesoscale anticyclonic vortices. Eddy shedding is not, however, inevitable.
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- The Turbulent Ocean , pp. 321 - 339Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005