HR: 13:55h
AN: OS53B-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Internal Tide Generation at the Sur Platform Region of Monterey Bay
AU: * Jachec, S M
EM: sjachec@fit.edu
AF: Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, United States
AU: Fringer, O B
EM: fringer@stanford.edu
AF: Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, United States
AU: Gerritsen, M G
EM: margot.gerritsen@stanford.edu
AF: Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, United States
AU: Gerritsen, M G
EM: margot.gerritsen@stanford.edu
AF: Dept. of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2220, United States
AU: Street, R L
EM: street@stanford.edu
AF: Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, United States
AB: Understanding the evolution of the internal tide field within the complex coastal ocean environment is essential to describing the interplay between bathymetry, internal tides, and areas of elevated dissipation. In an effort to gain insight into internal tide generation within the Monterey Bay area, we used high-resolution numerical simulation results from the nonhydrostatic, nonlinear, unstructured grid code SUNTANS. Our depth-integrated, M2-period averaged energy fluxes and energy flux divergences show the bulk of internal tide energy propagating from the south and into the Monterey Submarine Canyon from a location north of Sur Platform. From our previous simulations, a region of elevated internal tide activity occurs north of Sur Platform. Here we analyze and shed light on its structure and generation mechanism. Instantaneous plots of baroclinic velocity and horizontal kinetic energy are used to show the horizontal and vertical structure of the internal tide. When model results are plotted along with theoretical tidal characteristics, it may be concluded that the internal tide generated at the Sur Platform region is three-dimensional and linear. Furthermore, our simulation suggests the hotspot of internal tide activity north of Sur Platform results from the interaction between tidal beams generated from Sur Platform (north-south direction) and the shelf break (east- west direction). Acknowledgment: This work is supported by ONR grant N00014-05-1-0294. Simulations are carried out on the JVN cluster at the ARL Major Shared Resource Center.
UR: http://suntans.stanford.edu
DE: 4255 Numerical modeling (0545, 0560)
DE: 4534 Hydrodynamic modeling
DE: 4544 Internal and inertial waves
DE: 9355 Pacific Ocean
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting