Lack of accurate criteria for onset of incipient motion and sediment pickup function remain two of the biggest hurdles in developing better predictive models for sediment transport. To study pickup and transport of sediment, it is necessary to have a detailed knowledge of the small amplitude oscillatory flow over the sediment layer near the sea bed. Fully resolved direct numerical simulations are performed using fictitious domain approach (Apte & Finn, 2012) to investigate the effect of a sinusoidally oscillating flow field over a rough wall made of regular hexagonal pack of spherical particles. The flow arrangement is similar to the experimental data of Keiller & Sleath (1976). Transitional and turbulent flows at Re d = 95, 150, 200 (based on the Stokes layer thickness, d =) are studied. Turbulent flow is characterized in terms of coherent vortex structures, Reynolds stress variation and PDF distributions. The nature of unsteady hydrodynamic lift forces on sediment grains and their correlation to sweep and burst events is also reported. The dynamics of the oscillatory flow over the sediment bed is used to understand the mechanism of sediment pickup .

The combined effectiveness of model reduction and the quasilinear approximation for the reproduction of the low-order statistics of oceanic surface boundary layer turbulence is investigated. Idealized horizontally homogeneous problems of surface-forced thermal convection and Langmuir turbulence are studied in detail. Model reduction is achieved with a Galerkin projection of the governing equations onto a subset of modes determined by proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). When applied to boundary layers that are horizontally homogeneous, POD and a horizontally averaged quasilinear approximation both assume flow features that are horizontally wavelike, making the pairing very efficient. For less than 0.2% of the modes retained, the reduced quasilinear model is able to reproduce vertical profiles of horizontal mean fields as well as certain energetically important second-order turbulent transport statistics and energies to within 30% error. Reduced-basis quasilinear statistics must approach the full-basis statistics as the basis size approaches completion; however, some quasilinear statistics resemble those found in the fully nonlinear simulations at smaller basis truncations. Thus, model reduction could possibly improve upon the accuracy of quasilinear dynamics.

We present improvements in the modeling of the vertical wavenumber spectrum of the internal gravity wave continuum in high‐resolution regional ocean simulations. We focus on model sensitivities to mixing parameters and comparisons to McLane moored profiler observations in a Pacific region near the Hawaiian Ridge, which features strong semidiurnal tidal beams. In these simulations, the modeled continuum exhibits high sensitivity to the background mixing components of the K‐Profile Parameterization (KPP) vertical mixing scheme. Without the KPP background mixing, stronger vertical gradients in velocity are sustained in the simulations and the modeled kinetic energy and shear spectral slopes are significantly closer to the observations. The improved representation of internal wave dynamics in these simulations makes them suitable for improving ocean mixing estimates and for the interpretation of satellite missions such as the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission.

The internal-wave (IW) continuum of a regional ocean model is studied in terms of the vertical spectral kinetic-energy (KE) fluxes and transfers at high vertical wavenumbers. Previous work has shown that this model permits a partial representation of the IW cascade. In this work, vertical spectral KE flux is decomposed into catalyst, source, and destination frequency bands of nonlinear scattering, a framework that allows for the discernment of different types of nonlinear interactions involving both waves and eddies. Energy transfer within the supertidal IW continuum is found to be strongly dependent on horizontal resolution. Specifically, at a horizontal grid spacing of 1/48 • , the vast majority of KE in the supertidal continuum arrives there from lower frequency modes through a single nonlinear interaction, while at 1/384 • KE transfers within the supertidal IW continuum are comparable in size to KE transfer from lower-frequency modes. Additionally, comparisons are made with existing theoretical and observational work on energy pathways in the IW continuum. Induced diffusion (ID) is found to be associated with a weak forward frequency transfer within the supertidal IW continuum. Spectrally local interactions are found to play an insignificant role within the model evolution. At the same time, ID-like processes involving high vertical-wavenumber near-inertial and tidal waves as well as low-vertical-wavenumber eddy fields are substantial, suggesting that the processes giving rise to a Garrett-Munk-like spectra in the present numerical simulation and perhaps the real ocean may be more varied than in idealized or wave-only frameworks.