Great Lake Seminar Series, James Richman, Internal tides and waves in the global ocean

Great Lakes Seminar Series, James Richman, Internal tides and waves in the global ocean. July 20, 2016.

Abstract: The gravitational forcing of the sun and moon plus the self-attraction and loading (SAL) for the solid earth and ocean tides has been applied to an eddy resolving, global ocean circulation model. A technique borrowed from data assimilation, Augmented State Ensemble Kalman Filter (ASEnKF), has been used to correct for poorly estimated SAL and errors in bathymetry, geometry and numerics to generate a surface (or barotropic) tide with a global rms error of 2.6 cm. The surface tide generates an internal tide. Except near the generation regions, the internal tide is not stationary nor phase locked to the surface tide. In the model, the loss of stationarity is not associated with strong dissipation. The internal tide generates internal gravity waves. The model internal wave spectra resemble observations and the predictions of the Garrett-Munk internal wave spectrum.

Bio: Dr. James Richman is a Senior Scientist in the Center for Ocean and Atmosphere Prediction Studies (COAPS) at Florida State University. Dr. Richman received his Ph.D. from MIT Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Prior to jointing FSU in 2015, he was a professor at Oceanography Department at Oregon State University, program manager at NASA and Oceanographer at the Naval Research Laboratory. His current research projects include high-resolution global ocean models, and internal tides.