{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/decaying-turbulence-beneath-surface-waves","title":"Phenomenology of decaying turbulence beneath surface waves","arxiv_id":"2503.03871","date":"2025-03-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gregory L. Wagner","Navid C. Constantinou"],"abstract":"This paper explores decaying turbulence beneath surface waves that is initially isotropic and shear-free. We start by presenting phenomenology revealed by wave-averaged numerical simulations: an accumulation of angular momentum in coherent vortices perpendicular to the direction of wave propagation, suppression of kinetic energy dissipation, and the development of depth-alternating jets. We interpret these features through an analogy with rotating turbulence (Holm 1996), wherein the curl of the Stokes drift, $\\boldsymbol{\\nabla}\\times\\boldsymbol{u}^S$, takes on the role of the background vorticity (for example, $(f_0 + \\beta y) \\hat{\\boldsymbol{z}}$ on the beta plane). We pursue this thread further by showing that a two-equation model proposed by Bardina et al. (1985) for rotating turbulence reproduces the simulated evolution of volume-integrated kinetic energy. This success of the two-equation model -- which explicitly parametrizes wave-driven suppression of kinetic energy dissipation -- carries implications for modeling turbulent mixing in the ocean surface boundary layer. We conclude with a discussion about a wave-averaged analogue of the Rossby number appearing in the two-equation model, which we term the \"pseudovorticity number\" after the pseudovorticity $\\boldsymbol{\\nabla}\\times\\boldsymbol{u}^S$. The pseudovorticity number is related to the Langmuir number in an integral sense.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03871v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03871v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"decaying-turbulence-beneath-surface-waves","repo_url":"https://github.com/glwagner/WaveAveragedDecayingTurbulence","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}