Steven M. Jachec

The formation and fate of internal waves in the South China Sea

Internal gravity waves, the subsurface analogue of the familiar surface gravity waves that break on beaches, are ubiquitous in the ocean. Because of their strong vertical and horizontal currents, and the turbulent mixing caused by their breaking, they affect a panoply of ocean processes, such as the supply of nutrients for photosynthesis, sediment and pollutant transport and acoustic transmission; they also pose hazards for man-made structures in the ocean. Generated primarily by the wind and the tides, internal waves can travel thousands of kilometres from their sources before breaking, making it challenging to observe them and to include them in numerical climate models, which are sensitive to their effects. For over a decade, studies have targeted the South China Sea, where the oceans’ most powerful known internal waves are generated in the Luzon Strait and steepen dramatically as they propagate west. Confusion has persisted regarding their mechanism of generation, variability and energy budget, however, owing to the lack of in situ data from the Luzon Strait, where extreme flow conditions make measurements difficult. Here we use new observations and numerical models to (1) show that the waves begin as sinusoidal disturbances rather than arising from sharp hydraulic phenomena, (2) reveal the existence of >200-metre-high breaking internal waves in the region of generation that give rise to turbulence levels >10,000 times that in the open ocean, (3) determine that the Kuroshio western boundary current noticeably refracts the internal wave field emanating from the Luzon Strait, and (4) demonstrate a factor-of-two agreement between modelled and observed energy fluxes, which allows us to produce an observationally supported energy budget of the region. Together, these findings give a cradle-to-grave picture of internal waves on a basin scale, which will support further improvements of their representation in numerical climate predictions.

The integrated ocean dynamics and acoustics project

The goal of timely and accurate acoustics modeling in the ocean depends on accurate environmental input information. Acoustic propagation modeling has improved to the point of possibly being ahead of ocean dynamical modeling from the standpoint that some significant ocean features having strong acoustic effects are not faithfully reproduced in many models, particularly data-driven ocean models. This in part stems from the fact that ocean models have developed with other goals in mind, but computational limitations also play a role. The Integrated Ocean Dynamics and Acoustics (IODA) MURI project has as its goals improving ocean models, and also making continued improvements to acoustic models, for the purpose of advancing ocean acoustic modeling and prediction capabilities. Two major focuses are improved internal tide forecasting and improved nonlinear internal wave forecasting, which require pushing the state of the art in data-constrained mesoscale feature modeling as well as developing specialized high-...

Corrigendum: The formation and fate of internal waves in the South China Sea

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature14399