Atmosphere Ocean Science Colloquium

Toward Understanding the Multi-Scale Coupling in Global Oceanic Flows

Speaker: Hussein Aluie, University of Rochester

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Wednesday, February 28, 2018, 3:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

Large-scale currents and eddies pervade the ocean and play a prime role in the general circulation and climate. The coupling between scales ranging from $O(10^4)$ km down to $O(1)$ mm presents a major difficulty in understanding, modeling, and predicting oceanic circulation and mixing, where our constraints on the energy budget suffer from large uncertainties. Identifying the energy sources and sinks at various scales and geographic locations can reduce such uncertainty and yield insight into new parameterizations of nonlinear physical processes. In this talk, I will discuss current efforts in our group to tackle these problems using a coarse-graining framework to analyze multi-scale dynamics in complex flows, including those in the ocean.