Atmosphere Ocean Science Colloquium

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Characterizing Ocean Dynamics With The Scattering Transform

Speaker: Albion Lawrence, Brandeis University

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 3:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

A typical starting point for studying spatial maps of sea surface height produced by satellite altimetry is the Fourier (wavenumber) power spectrum, as different theories of turbulence, as well as the phenomenological Garrett-Munk spectrum for internal gravity waves, produce distinct power laws. However, in practice, one often has a decade or less of a given power law regime making these power laws difficult to extract. For example, different theories of turbulence can produce power laws whose difference is smaller than the estimation error. Finally, these power spectra are known to give no information about the distinctive structures that seem central to turbulence, which are recorded in phase information and correlations between scales. In this talk we describe ongoing work on the wavelet scattering transform and its uses in distinguishing such spatial features. We apply it to idealized simulations as well as a high-resolution simulation of the North Atlantic and show that the transform can discriminate between different types of turbulence with nearly identical power law behavior, and that it effectively disentangles internal gravity waves and turbulent motion.