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CliMA / ClimaOcean.jl

🌎 Tools for realistic regional-to-global ocean simulations, and coupled ocean + sea-ice simulations based on Oceananigans and ClimaSeaIce. Basis for the ocean and sea-ice component of CliMA's Earth system model.
https://clima.github.io/ClimaOceanDocumentation/dev/
MIT License
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Why are the turbulent temperature and moisture flux scales reduced by the turbulent Prandtl number? #100

Open glwagner opened 3 months ago

glwagner commented 3 months ago

Why these lines?

https://github.com/CliMA/ClimaOcean.jl/blob/10a33756f14f09659784f99b8224d99120eda30f/src/OceanSeaIceModels/CrossRealmFluxes/similarity_theory_turbulent_fluxes.jl#L256-L257

glwagner commented 3 months ago

cc @simone-silvestri

simone-silvestri commented 3 months ago

The turbulent Prandtl number scales the size of the thermal (and scalar) boundary layer with respect to the momentum boundary layer. By default is one though.

glwagner commented 3 months ago

The question is why this gets applied here, after solving for the scales. It this consistent with

https://github.com/CliMA/ClimaOcean.jl/blob/10a33756f14f09659784f99b8224d99120eda30f/src/OceanSeaIceModels/CrossRealmFluxes/similarity_theory_turbulent_fluxes.jl#L386

For example, when we compute the buoyancy scale:

https://github.com/CliMA/ClimaOcean.jl/blob/10a33756f14f09659784f99b8224d99120eda30f/src/OceanSeaIceModels/CrossRealmFluxes/similarity_theory_turbulent_fluxes.jl#L364

We assume that θ★ is the scale for the temperature flux. But if the actual temperature flux is θ★ / similarity_theory.turbulent_prandtl_number then this also needs to be incorporated into computing the buoyancy scale.