Turbulence Process Domination under the Combined Forcings of Wind Stress, the Langmuir Vortex Force, and Surface Cooling

Abstract

Abstract Turbulence in the ocean surface layer is generated by time-varying combinations of destabilizing surface buoyancy flux, wind stress forcing, and wave forcing through a vortex force associated with the surface wave field. Observations of time- and depth-averaged vertical velocity variance of full-depth turbulence in shallow unstratified water columns under destabilizing buoyancy forcing are used to determine when process domination can be assigned over a wide range of mixed forcings. The properties of two turbulence archetypes, one representing full-depth Langmuir circulations and the other representing full-depth convection, are described in detail. It is demonstrated that these archetypes lie in distinct regions of the plane of , where and are Langmuir and Rayleigh numbers, respectively, derived from scaling with surface stress velocity and a time scale characteristic of the growth of Langmuir circulation , where and are mean and Stokes velocities, respectively. Situations in which neither process dominates lie between the two end members, with relative dominance given by proximity to one or the other. Cases dominated by direct stress forcing are conspicuous by their absence. In cases of Langmuir domination, surface Stokes velocity is linearly related to , making it impossible to differentiate between scaling depth-averaged vertical velocity variance with , and any other scaling involving both and . A third nondimensional parameter is introduced and used to assess the importance of bottom boundary layer turbulence in a depth-limited system. Questions of time dependence and applicability of results to the open ocean surface boundary layer are considered.