Energy and Momentum Lost to Wake Eddies and Lee Waves Generated by the North Equatorial Current and Tidal Flows at Peleliu, Palau

Turbulence and Vorticity in the Wake of Palau

“…Such direct measurements of turbulence in island wakes have received only minimal attention, most notably for cases of island wakes in the Kuroshio Current (Hasegawa et al, 2004(Hasegawa et al, , 2009Chang et al, 2013). At Palau, our measurements were among several efforts measuring microstructure by traditional ship-based profiling (MacKinnon et al, 2019;Johnston et al, 2019, in this issue). Our glider-based survey was unique in measuring microstructure from an autonomous under water vehicle.…”

Observations of Near-Inertial Surface Currents at Palau

“…Recent studies at Velasco (MacKinnon et al, 2019;Zeiden et al, 2019) and Peleliu (Johnston et al, 2019, in this issue) suggest that swift currents at these sites generate wake eddies with strong local vorticity. To explore the extent to which NIOs contribute to island wakes, we use the surface-averaged currents from the mooring array deployed to the north of Velasco Reef (red circles in Figure 1) to compute the vertical component of vorticity (Figure 7a, moorings F2, F3, and F6).…”

Connecting Process Models of Topographic Wave Drag to Global Eddying General Circulation Models

“…There are several ways in which flow-topography interactions that impose drag on the underlying flow, the subject of the Flow Encountering Abrupt Topography (FLEAT) field program discussed by Johnston et al (2019) and others in this special issue, have been employed in global HYCOM simulations. The simplest is quadratic bottom boundary layer drag (Taylor, 1919; hereafter, often called "quadratic bottom drag"), which is proportional to the square of the flow velocity and to a drag coefficient that is typically kept constant throughout the spatial domain of global ocean models.…”