Peddada, S.H., Arbic, B.K., Menemenlis, D., Skitka, J., Shaji, A.V., Buijsman, M.C., Polzin, K.L., Momeni, K., and Peltier, W.R. (2026)
Presented at:
Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026Internal wave-driven mixing is a crucial component of ocean mixing in the ocean interior. Recent advances in high-resolution global ocean general circulation models allow us to map realistic internal wave-driven dissipation and mixing quasi-directly, from simulations. In this study, we generate and analyze global maps of internal wave dissipation from the 1/48° MITgcm model (Marshall et.al., 1997), popularly known as the LLC4320 (Rocha et. al, 2016), which is a primitive equation model simulation resolving both mesoscale eddies and internal waves simultaneously. To validate our analysis of the global model, a depth profile of time-averaged dissipation in a 6° by 8° box in the North Pacific near Hawaii obtained by horizontally averaging, is compared with dissipation profiles obtained from fine-structure parameterizations applied to data from CTDs (Kunze, 2017) and ADCPs (Pollmann, 2017) and a previous regional study. We see good agreement in the ocean interior below 500m between the dissipation profiles from the global output, observations and the regional model. In addition, we will compare these dissipation rates with the residual dissipation, i.e., the sum of the most important energy terms in the internal wave energy equation inferred from the simulation. Global maps of internal wave dissipation will be obtained from depth-integrated dissipation from the model output and compared with maps from in situ data. These maps provide a geographic distribution of internal wave dissipation. Also, to get deeper insights into the temporal variation of dissipation, model output would be analyzed in different seasons.
