Skip to main content

Oceanography in 2025 Proceedings of a Workshop (2009) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:

Simulations of Marine Turbulence and Surface Waves: Potential Impacts of Petascale Technology--Peter P. Sullivan
Pages 84-88

The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.


From page 84...
... Petascale computing Large scale parallel computing is a potential boon to the scientific interests of the geoscience communities and in particular oceanography. Over the next decade, computing systems will routinely attain peak speeds of one petaflop and more (1015 floating point operations per second)
Read the entire page →
From page 85...
... Increases in computer power will also allow turbulent simulations over 3D topography, moving surface wave fields, and ocean boundary layers driven by hur FIGURE 1  Computational time per gridpoint for LES of a convective atmospheric boundary layer on a Cray XT4.
Read the entire page →
From page 86...
... The vertical profile of the mean wind shows the formation of a super geostrophic jet near the top of the boundary layer and the stair-step structure in the vertical heat flux profile is suggestive of Kelvin-Helmholtz overturning. Strongly stable boundary layers, zi/L > 2, with intermittent turbulence are not adequately simulated with current LES and DNS.
Read the entire page →
From page 87...
... The rapid oscillations in the scalar flux below the thermocline result from a complex system of internal waves excited by the strong wind forcing. The LES mesh is 500 × 500 × 160 gridpoints and the timestep ∆t varies from 15 s to 0.5 s over the length of the simulation.
Read the entire page →
From page 88...
... LWS will replace the current generation of spectral wave models which are largely built with heavy doses of empiricism for the wind input and dissipation source functions. LWS will answer fundamental questions as to how waves grow and the dependence on wave age and wave slope for a spectrum of waves.
Read the entire page →

Key Terms

  • boundary layers
  • ocean boundary
  • scalar flux
  • stable boundary
  • current generation

  • atmospheric boundary
  • lws model
  • strongly stable
  • intermittent turbulence
  • allow dns

  • magnitude increase
  • convective atmospheric
  • temperature decrease
  • layers driven
  • mean wind

  • spectral wave
  • wave fields
  • adequately simulated
  • geoscience communities
  • parallel computing

  • classical daytime
  • naturally capture
  • velocity field
  • shed light
  • image bitmap

  • answer fundamental
  • source functions
  • currently addressed
  • filtering step
  • achieve sustained


    • This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
    More information on Chapter Skim is available.