Date of Award

Summer 1976

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Ocean & Earth Sciences

Program/Concentration

Oceanography

Committee Director

Chester E. Grosch

Committee Member

Ronald E. Johnson

Committee Member

George S. Ofelt

Committee Member

Earl C. Kindle

Committee Member

Robert A. LaBudde

Abstract

The intradiumal heating and cooling cycle of the mixed layer of a tropical ocean is investigated through the use of a pseudo-two-dimensional numerical model. Particular emphasis is given to two-component diffusion resulting from dynamic instabilities in the water column. The conservation equations for salt and heat include the effects of solar heating, horizontal advectlon, and turbulent fluxes at the sea surface, while wind mixing enter through the use of depth-dependent eddy diffusion coefficients resulting from the wave-orbital shear model of KitaigorodsldLy. All inputs are treated as functions of time-of-day, or calculated via the bulk aerodynamic method.

The entrainment fluxes of salt and heat due to the mechanical stirring of the wind and the fluxes due to molecular diffusion are treated as separate, their respective contributions being added to form the diffusion coefficients used in an altemating-direction explicit scheme to integrate the heat and salt equations. Near the surface, in the absence of strong solar heating (i.e., nighttime), these two fluxes alone are insufficient to remove the near-surface static instabilities; thus the presence of some additional process is suggested. A dynamic stability analysis is carried out, based on the temperature and salinity gradients.

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DOI

10.25777/rz6y-4487

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