A Novel Method to Unravelling Energy Pathways in the Ocean

Large-scale currents and eddies pervade the ocean and play a prime role in the general circulation and climate. The coupling between scales ranging from {\$}O(10\textasciicircum 4){\$} km down to {\$}O(1){\$} mm presents a major difficulty in understanding, modeling, and predicting oceanic circulation and mixing, where the energy budget is uncertain within a factor possibly as large as ten. Identifying the energy sources and sinks at various scales can reduce such uncertainty and yield insight into new parameterizations. To this end, we refine a novel coarse-graining framework, which accounts for the spherical geometry of the problem, to directly analyze the coupling between scales. We apply these tools to strongly eddying high-resolution simulations using LANL's Parallel Ocean Program (POP).