WHOI PO

Title: Near-inertial waves on the Texas-Louisiana shelf
Abstract: The Texas-Louisiana shelf is a highly energetic coastal region in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Large freshwater fluxes from the Mississippi-Atchafalaya river system maintain a strong cross-shelf salinity gradient that feeds a rich field of submesoscale eddies, fronts and filaments. The nutrient supply and strong stratification associated with the freshwater influx combine to create one of the world’s largest regions of summertime bottom hypoxia. However, recent studies have shown that bottom Oxygen displays variability on time and length scales commensurate with the overlying submesoscale activity. The shelf is also host to strong near-inertial motions. It straddles the 29°N parallel, where the inertial period is 24.8 hours, allowing diurnal land-sea breezes to efficiently force near-inertial currents. In this talk, I will explore the dynamics of these near-inertial motions  — their interactions, or lack thereof, with the submesoscale features and their role in the vertical exchange of Oxygen and other tracers. I will present observations from the recent SUNRISE (Submesoscales Under Near Resonant Inertial Shear Experiment) field campaign and relate them to theoretical developments in the interactions of near-inertial waves with fronts and filaments.