Early Measurements of Turbulence in the Ocean: Motives and Techniques

Abstract

Abstract In the summer of 1950, the authors joined the staff of the Pacific Naval Laboratory (PNL) of the Defense Research Board of Canada. A research program was undertaken to see if the turbulent wake of a submarine could be detected for a useful distance behind the submarine. Initially almost nothing was known about either the nature of submarine wakes or the background turbulence in the ocean and the studies of both were undertaken. Initial attempts, starting in 1952, to adapt to the ocean the hot-wire anemometer technology used in studying laboratory turbulence, were total failures. The wires proved efficient plankton catchers, particularly of small gelatinous species. But by 1957 hot-films had been demonstrated to work in wind tunnels and the PNL team was expanded with additional physics and engineering support to develop a hot-film system specifically designed to work in seawater, which by this time was recognized to be an electrically conducting plankton soup. The research program was designed to ...