Density Stratification, Turbulence, but How Much Mixing?

Abstract

We examine observations of turbulence in the geophysical environment, primarily from oceans but also from lakes, in light of theory and experimental studies undertaken in the laboratory and with numerical simulation. Our focus is on turbulence in density-stratified environments and on the irreversible fluxes of tracers that actively contribute to the density field. Our understanding to date has come from focusing on physical problems characterized by high Reynolds number flows with no spatial or temporal variability, and we examine the applicability of these results to the natural or geophysical-scale problems. We conclude that our sampling and interpretation of the results remain a first-order issue, and despite decades of ship-based observations we do not begin to approach a reliable sampling of the overall turbulent structure of the ocean interior.