Journal
JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY
Volume 44, Issue 4, Pages 1049-1064Publisher
AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1175/JPO-D-12-0229.1
Keywords
Shear structure/flows; Coastal flows; Dispersion; Circulation/ Dynamics; In situ oceanic observations; Observational techniques and algorithms; Internal waves; Tracers
Categories
Funding
- NSF [OCE-0926340, OCE-0926738, OCE-0925916]
- Stanford Graduate Fellowship (SGF)
- Singapore-Stanford Program
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Autonomous underwater vehicle measurements are used to quantify lateral dispersion of a continuously released Rhodamine WT dye plume within the stratified interior of shelf waters in northern Monterey Bay, California. The along-shelf evolution of the plume's cross-shelf (lateral) width provides evidence for scale-dependent dispersion following the 4/3 law, as previously observed in both surface and bottom layers. The lateral dispersion coefficient is observed to grow to 0.5 m(2) s(-1) at a distance of 700 m downstream of the dye source. The role of shear and associated intermittent turbulent mixing within the stratified interior is investigated as a driving mechanism for lateral dispersion. Using measurements of time-varying temperature and horizontal velocities, both an analytical shear-flow dispersion model and a particle-tracking model generate estimates of the lateral dispersion that agree with the field-measured 4/3 law of dispersion, without explicit appeal to any assumed turbulence structure.
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