A Novel Approach to Unravelling Energy Pathways in the Ocean

The oceans display energetic dynamics across a wide range of spatial scales, and researchers have long worked to better understand the energy coupling between these various scales. While there have been previous attempts to understand energy pathways, assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy have presented a limitation upon the applicability of the analyses. Here we present a more general technique, unrestricted by the usual assumptions of homogeneity or isotropy, which allows one to simultaneously probe the dynamics in both space and time. We make use of a novel coarse-graining framework, which accounts for the spherical geometry of the problem, to directly analyze the coupling between scales. We apply this technique to strongly eddying high-resolution simulations using LANL’s Parallel Ocean Program.