Breaking waves are well understood for single layers of
homogeneous fluids. For internal waves in stratified fluids,
however, breaking waves involve significant amounts of mixing.
This renders the problem both more interesting (since
mixing processes are a fundamental component of ocean and
atmosphere dynamics), and more challenging: a new closure
is needed to complete the jump conditions associated with
mass and momentum conservation.
This talk will describe some recent work on quantifying
mixing by breaking waves, with applications to ocean dynamics.
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