Brodie Pearson
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
The top layer of the ocean is constantly churned by turbulence. This mixing controls how heat, gases and other properties pass between the ocean and the atmosphere.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
upper ocean turbulence
ocean mixing
anisotropy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Develop statistical methods that use the anisotropy of turbulence to distinguish 3-D upper ocean mixing regimes driven by heating or cooling, wind shear and wave-wind interactions.
- Extend 2-D turbulence analysis techniques, which measure energy transfer between scales without Fourier transforms, to diagnose energy transfers and their directional variation in 3-D turbulence.
- Test and validate the methods on synthetic data from numerical simulations of upper ocean turbulence, then apply them to ADCP current measurements collected on research cruises.
More about the research
Different forces at the surface create different kinds of mixing. These include heating and cooling, wind shear (wind dragging the water), and interactions between waves and wind. Each kind of mixing is anisotropic, meaning it behaves differently in the up-down and side-to-side directions, and each does so in its own way. Direct measurements are hard to collect and capture only parts of the picture, so scientists often cannot tell which kind of mixing is happening.
Why it matters
Ocean-atmosphere exchange of heat and other properties depends on how strongly and deeply the upper ocean mixes. Better tools for telling mixing types apart from routine ADCP current data could improve understanding of these exchanges and help check ocean simulations. The open-source software will let other oceanographers apply the methods to their own data.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andrey Shcherbina
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how anisotropic (direction-dependent) and inhomogeneous ocean surface boundary layer turbulence is, using two drifting Lagrangian floats each carrying customized ADCPs with 10 acoustic beams.
Amrapalli Garanaik
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop a new second-moment model of the upper ocean boundary layer that represents both local and nonlocal turbulent transport, tuned to observations and Large-Eddy Simulation results.
Tomas Chor
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Examine how symmetric instabilities, an overturning motion that grows at ocean fronts, modify the forward cascade of energy toward smaller scales at submesoscale fronts in the presence of mesoscale strain.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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