Lagrangian statistics of mesoscale turbulence in a natural environment: The Agulhas return current

Phys Rev E. 2016 Dec;94(6-1):063101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.063101. Epub 2016 Dec 5.

Abstract

The properties of mesoscale geophysical turbulence in an oceanic environment have been investigated through the Lagrangian statistics of sea surface temperature measured by a drifting buoy within the Agulhas return current, where strong temperature mixing produces locally sharp temperature gradients. By disentangling the large-scale forcing which affects the small-scale statistics, we found that the statistical properties of intermittency are identical to those obtained from the multifractal prediction in the Lagrangian frame for the velocity trajectory. The results suggest a possible universality of turbulence scaling.