M2 Internship:

Energetics of Jets in Two-Dimensional Oceanic Turbulence

Location: Equipe MEOM, IGE, Université Grenoble Alpes

Contact: Lennard Miller (Lennard.Miller@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr)
Internship period: February 1 to June 30, 2024
Keywords: Theoretical Oceanography, Turbulence, Spectral Analysis
Description of the subject:
The ocean is one of the most turbulent environments of our planet (Re ≈ 1010). At large horizontal
scales, the turbulence is constrained by the ocean’s very thin aspect ratio, meaning that it can be
considered two-dimensional. This yields interesting behavior: instead of the direct energy cascade
of three-dimensional turbulence, two-dimensional flows are subject to an inverse cascade of energy
and tend to accumulate energy at large scales. To date it remains unclear what halts this upscale
transfer of energy in the ocean. On the one hand, dissipation in boundary currents such as the Gulf
Stream can play a role, while another mechanism which becomes important at large scales is the
excitation of planetary waves. These waves can transfer their energy into the time-mean flow and
drive jets, as recently observed in the world’s ocean [1] (see figure 1).
Recent advances in idealized modeling of oceanic turbulence showed that dissipation at the coasts
can be strong enough to halt the inverse cascade, producing small-scale features through
fragmentation of vortices [2]. However, planetary wave activity and weak jet structures were also
observed during these simulations. The goals of this internship are to characterize these structures
and to see whether the model is capable of producing more pronounced jets.
The student will perform high-resolution simulations of two-dimensional oceanic circulation,
varying the rotation rate of the planet and analyzing the time-mean flow structure. Thereafter we
will perform a flow decomposition into the time-mean flow, planetary waves and turbulence, in
order to trace the pathways of energy in the flow. During the internship the student will learn how
to perform computations on supercomputer clusters and acquire an advanced understanding of
spectral analysis, asymptotic expansions and oceanic turbulence. Prior knowledge of oceanic
circulation theory is helpful but not required, instead we encourage students with backgrounds in
physics or mathematics to apply.

Westwards Velocity, U (cm/s)

Figure 1: Ocean surface velocity along westwards direction from [1]. The jets are the alternating
elongated structures in the green box.

[1] N. A. Maximenko, B. Bang, and H. Sasaki. Observational evidence of alternating zonal jets in the world ocean. Geophysical
research letters, 32(12), 2005.
[2] L. Miller, A. Venaille, and B. Deremble. Gyre turbulence (arxiv.org/abs/2310.02187), 2023.