Oceanography

Turbulence and Structure Functions #

In general, I’m interested in the connections between our analytical and numerical understanding of the ocean, focusing on ocean mixing and turbulence. My goal is to improve our understanding of how energy and other flow properties move between scales. This spectral flux can help establish the ocean’s energy budget, which is relevant to topics like the amount of mixing in the upper ocean and its ability to absorb heat and carbon from the atmosphere. It is also important for ensuring the accuracy of large-scale ocean models, as they can’t directly simulate turbulence at smaller scales. Many of my current research questions are related to structure functions, which connect energy dissipation and related variables to the differences between flow variables (such as velocity and advection) at pairs of grid points at a constant distance. These methods have a long history in isotropic flows, but there is substantial work remaining to develop and improve them for flow fields with directional dependence.

I am currently working on taking transformation methods (see Xie and Bühler, 2018, Pearson et al, 2026) developed for 2-dimensional flows (as vertical motion is typically very small at large scales in the ocean) and extending them to three dimensions, for cases such as upper ocean turbulence. I am also developing more efficient methods of calculating structure functions, including through the use of vectorized operations on CUDA GPUs, which I hope to incorporate into fluidsf. In addition, I have begun working on the scaling properties of Oceananigans across multiple GPUs, which can allow for larger, faster ocean simulations than a single GPU can provide, while using less resources than a comparable simulation on a large CPU cluster.