Meeting Abstracts
Parameterization of particle transport at submesoscales
A. C. Haza, T. M. Ozgokmen, A. Griffa, Z. D. Garraffo, L. Piterbarg
University of Miami
(Abstract received 05/14/2012 for session C)
ABSTRACT
A Lagrangian hybrid approach is put forward, in which the modeled transport is based on the deterministic Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) over the mesoscale range and the statistical Lagrangian subgridscale (LSGS) models over the submesoscale range. Two HYCOM solutions at different resolutions, namely with 1/12 and 1/48 degree horizontal meshes respectively, are considered, and a measure of relative dispersion is used as our main metric to diagnose their differences in terms of transport. The particular focus of this study is on correcting the underestimation of submesoscale dispersion regime in the 1/12 degree solution, while the 1/48 degree resolution case and an existing observational data set indicate a trend toward much higher dispersion. LSGS models that had been developed on the basis of statistical considerations are investigated in order to tackle the multi-scale ocean transport problem.