Measurements and Modeling of Turbulent Properties in the Adriatic Sea

Sandro Carniel
CNR-ISMAR, Venice, Italy


As part of the DART06A-6B cruises, carried out by NRV Alliance of the NATO Undersea Research Center (NURC) in late March and August 2006, a microstructure profiler was deployed to make turbulence measurements in the upper layers of the Southern Adriatic Sea. More than 500 casts were made, resulting in the largest dataset available to-date to our knowledge in this semi-enclosed basin. The main objective of these measurements is to help improve second moment closure (SCM) based ocean mixed layer (OML) models that are in current (and potential future) use in Navy community and operational ocean circulation models. This talk will shortly describe some preliminary results and first comparisons with the ROMS numerical ocean model.