Lagrangian statistics of mesoscale turbulence in a natural environment: The Agulhas return current.

Carbone, Francesco; Gencarelli, Christian N; Hedgecock, Ian M · Phys Rev E · 2016

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Abstract

The properties of mesoscale geophysical turbulence in an oceanic environment have been investigated through the Lagrangian statistics of sea surface temperature measured by a drifting buoy within the Agulhas return current, where strong temperature mixing produces locally sharp temperature gradients. By disentangling the large-scale forcing which affects the small-scale statistics, we found that the statistical properties of intermittency are identical to those obtained from the multifractal prediction in the Lagrangian frame for the velocity trajectory. The results suggest a possible universality of turbulence scaling.