Turbulence in the statically unstable oceanic boundary layer under Arctic leads

Abstract

Measurements of turbulent stress, heat flux, salinity flux, and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) dissipation were made in the oceanic boundary layer under freezing leads during the 1992 Lead Experiment project in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. Results from two instrument systems, one comprising a vertical array of four turbulence‐measuring instrument clusters, the other an automated, loose‐tethered microstructure profiler, show that forcing by modest surface fluxes (surface friction velocity u*0 ∼ 0.7 cm s−1, surface buoyancy flux 〈w′b′〉0 ∼ −0.7 × 10−7 W kg−1) substantially changes the scales and character of boundary layer turbulence relative to forcing by stress alone. Despite continuous freezing at the surface, a diurnal cycle of heating and cooling of the mixed layer was seen, with downward oceanic heat flux as high as 70 W m−2 observed at middepth in the mixed layer near solar noon. Heat flux was determined both by direct eddy covariance of temperature and vertical velocity at fixed levels and from TKE and thermal dissipation estimates from the profiling instrument, with reasonable agreement. Similarly, there was close correspondence between TKE dissipation estimates obtained from inertial subrange spectral levels at the fixed instruments and from microstructure shear profiles. TKE production was dominated by buoyancy flux through most of the boundary layer. Thermal and saline eddy diffusivities were computed from directly measured fluxes and mixed layer temperature and salinity gradients, with mean values of 0.046 and 0.049 m2 s−1 for temperature and salinity, respectively. Kolmogorov constants for relating thermal and saline dissipations to inertial subrange spectral levels were found to be 0.9 and 1.0, respectively, but with large scatter.