Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)

Ocean Property Fluxes: a Pseudo-Lagrangian Approach

Lagrangian methods can provide insight into complex stirring and transport processes. These methods can provide a skeleton or template that allows one to identify regions of rapid stirring, transport, and transport barriers. 'Lobe dynamics', one of the most beautiful techniques in the toolbox, provides for the measurement and visualization of transport and exchange across moving boundaries. Other methods allow for the identification of natural barriers such as the material boundary of a coherent eddy. The focus is entirely on fluid 'material' transport (volume transport) and fluxes of oceanographically important properties such as heat, salt, vorticity and chemical and biological tracers are relevant only to the extent that they are conserved following fluid motion. In addition, lobe dynamics can become cumbersome when the flow field is complex. I will talk about a generalize approach that enables consideration of a variety of property fluxes, provides a simplified application to complex flow fields, and attempts to preserves the beauty of the original approach.