A brief tour of the description and simulation of internal waves in the coastal ocean

Date: Friday 23rd Feb 2024

Abstract

Internal gravity waves are a coherent and ubiquitious part of both the oceans and atmosphere. In the coastal ocean, internal waves often assume large amplitude, coherent forms often referred to as internal solitary-like waves. I will discuss the mathemtical description of such waves, pointing out that many textbook discussions are a bit dated, with more accurate, modern theories accessible on even laptop computers. I will then present a couple of different case studies of the computation of time dependent phenomena related to internal waves. Here I will focus on direct numerical simulation (DNS) so that the results may be compared with experiments, in an effort to identify mechanisms that would give us a language to interpret geographically sparse field measurements. I will conclude with several avenues for future work.