Abstract
The ocean circulation problem concerns the motion of a rotating stratified and turbulent fluid on a sphere (the Earth) with complex boundaries introduced by the break up of the continents. This nonlinear nature of ocean dynamics generates a wide variety of interesting physical phenomena mainly related to the existence of strong dynamical links among physical processes occurring at different space and time scales. These links range from space scales of centimeters and time scales that might be counted in minutes or hours, up to global motions with time scales of centuries, that control aspects of the Earth’s climate. This range of scale interactions shown by ocean dynamics induces the appearance of collective phenomena that are hardly explained by the individual properties of each ocean process. Understanding ocean dynamics requires not only the study of isolated individual ocean processes, but also the collective result emerging from the combination of these individual processes acting at different space and time scales. Therefore the study of ocean circulation becomes an extremely difficult task because it requires determining the whole set of space and time scales that characterize the behaviour of the ocean system.
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Alvarez, A., Tintoré, J. (1998). Topographic Stress: Importance and Parameterization. In: Chassignet, E.P., Verron, J. (eds) Ocean Modeling and Parameterization. NATO Science Series, vol 516. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5096-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5096-5_14
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