Characteristic Of Turbulent Mixing In The Yellow Sea

Ocean mixing is the universal movement of sea waters. The process of mixing can bring on transport of momentum and quantity of heat in horizontal and vertical direction, and make the sea water become homogenous. Ocean mixing has become an important and fast-developing field in physical oceanography, and become the choke point which restricts the prediction of the circulation,front and thermocline. So it is paid close attention to by more and more researchers recently.Based on the ADCP data of an anchor station in the coast of Qingdao (A3) in Dec. 14 , 2005, the feature of mean flow, Reynolds stress and turbulent kinetic energy production rate are analyzed. It is shown that coast of Qingdao is dominated by semidiurnal tidal component with tidal currents flowing back and forth. The phenomenon of flood-ebb asymmetry is obvious and flood is stronger than ebb. Bottom velocity is well-approximated by logrithmic distribution. By analyzing the temperature data from CTD, we estimate the Thorpe scale. Turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate (hence the vertical diffusivity) in the water column is estimated from the Thorpe displacements assuming that the Thorpe scale is equal to the Ozmidov scale. The Thorpe scale ranges from 1.1m to 9m with a 2h period in coast of Qingdao, and it's well-approximated by Weibull distribution. The magnitude of dissipation rate and vertical diffusivity is 10 ?7 W /kg and 10 ?3 m 2/s respectively, the former has periods of about 1.4h and 5.5h, while the later has periods of about 2h and 6h, and both the dissipation rate and the vertical diffusivity are fairly log-normal.Flow characteristic of two stations (A1 and A2) in the north Yellow Sea and south of Shandong peninsula is analyzed using the ADCP data in early Spring in 2005. Both station A1 and station A2 are dominated by semidiurnal tidal component. Tide at station A1 is strong and bottom velocity is fairly logrithmic, while tide at A2 is weak and bottom velocity is not logarithmic because of the strong wind during the observation. At the same time, bottom turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate at...