Conference: 2024 Gordon Research Conference on Ocean Mixing: Understanding the Role of Ocean Mixing Across Scales on Climate, Ecosystems, and Ocean Solutions to Societal Problems

Gordon Research Conferences, East Greenwich RI

Investigators

Abstract

This grant is to support the 2024 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Ocean Mixing, as well as the Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) for early career scientists. These will provide a forum to improve the broader community’s understanding of turbulent mixing in the ocean, including the interactions across scales, and practical applications. Ocean mixing has important impacts in many areas of societal relevance, including climate (e.g. ocean heat and carbon uptake, the meridional overturning circulation), weather (e.g. hurricane intensity), pollution (e.g. marine plastics) and ecosystems (e.g. hypoxia). More recently, as the possible role of the ocean in mitigating climate and ecosystem changes is being explored, changes to mixing resulting from ocean renewable energy and influence of ocean mixing on enhanced ocean carbon dioxide removal must also be considered. The 2024 GRC will make the connection between fundamental studies of ocean mixing and these important impacts and applications. The GRC format is designed to generate vigorous discussion and foster new collaborations, stimulating new understanding. The GRC will strengthen the connection between fundamental studies of ocean mixing and applications to societally relevant problems, with consequent benefits to society. The GRC will also foster an inclusive ocean mixing community by promoting new interactions between people working on different aspects, using different approaches, and at varied career levels, through focused discussions and facilitated informal networking activities. The GRS will enable the full participation of early career scientists in this community, contributing to workforce development. NSF support will help to eliminate financial barriers to participation, by supporting attendance of early career scientists and scientists from historically under-represented groups. Ocean mixing, which can loosely be defined as time-variable motion which increases fluxes of tracers above levels set by molecular diffusion, encompasses a wide variety of processes taking place over a large range of scales, from mesoscale geostrophic eddies to isotropic turbulence. Between these scales many different instability processes excite motions which lead to mixing. All these processes, except for the largest mesoscale eddies, occur on scales too small to explicitly simulate in the ocean component of climate models, requiring parameterizations of their impact on tracer fluxes to accurately capture their effect on the large scale ocean. The development of parameterizations requires experts in different aspects of ocean mixing - observations, theory, process simulation, laboratory experiments, regional and climate modeling - to work together. The GRC stimulates this collaboration between scientists using different approaches and focused on different scales, to better understand ocean mixing. The GRS provides a forum for early career scientists to network with their peers and engage in professional development prior to the main conference. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.