ICCS oceanographer builds innovative road map to better understand how waves tumble and break deep in the ocean

Dr Laura Cimoli of ICCS co-led a workshop that brought together a mixture of ocean explorers, conservationists, and other climate scientists to come up with the best way to observe, interpret and model turbulent mixing. This occurs when waves form and travel in the ocean interior. They act just like the waves that break on the seashore, but this happens below the surface. When waves break deeper down, they mix the water which can change the temperature, salinity, oxygen, and dissolved carbon dioxide at different depths.

Turbulent mixing is small-scale and sporadic, with changing outcomes depending on where it happens. As such, it is a great challenge to observe, let alone model and understand the impacts. When ocean researchers met at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, understanding turbulent mixing was one of five key goals.

The conference had a unique set-up called a Collective Solution Accelerator. The format combines about ten ocean researchers from different niches to work on a set of specific predefined tasks to do with the most pressing issues. The turbulent mixing workshop created a set of guidelines to help strengthen collaborations between those who observe and model ocean mixing to accelerate research and ultimately build models that better reflect the real world.

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During the workshop, ocean mixing experts discussed:

1. Advancements in mixing observations: huge technological developments over the last few years now allow researchers to expand mixing observations in time and space, in particular giving new insights into what happens very close to the seafloor, which is where a lot of the action is.
2. How to match such observations with numerical models, which need to be pushed to very high vertical and horizontal resolution to capture the small-scale internal wave dynamics.
3. How to assimilate such observations in ocean state estimates and improve their representation of turbulent mixing, which often relies on quite crude parameterizations. State estimates are an observation-constrained model solution of the ocean circulation and can be used as a “parent” to nest high-resolution model solutions.
4. How does mixing affect benthic ecosystems, and how can the benthic texture affect the bottom boundary layer. DOOS here plays a key role in connecting different communities together and creating multi-disciplinary studies.

Through engagement at the conference, Dr Cimoli and collaborators are working to expand the array of available mixing observations, create new opportunities for multi-disciplinary fieldwork, and strengthen collaborations between the mixing modelling and observational worlds.