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Do deep‐ocean kinetic energy spectra represent deterministic or stochastic signals?
Author(s) -
van Haren Hans
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: oceans
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-9291
pISSN - 2169-9275
DOI - 10.1002/2015jc011204
Subject(s) - harmonics , spectral line , kinetic energy , inertial frame of reference , physics , nonlinear system , amplitude , statistical physics , geology , geophysics , classical mechanics , computational physics , quantum mechanics , voltage
In analogy with historic analyses of shallow‐water tide‐gauge records, in which tides and their higher harmonics are modified by sea level changes induced by atmospheric disturbances, it is shown that deep‐sea currents can be interpreted as motions at predominantly inertial‐tidal harmonic frequencies modified by slowly varying background conditions. In this interpretation, their kinetic energy spectra may not be smoothed into a quasi‐stochastic continuum for (random‐)statistic confidence. Instead, they are considered as quasi‐deterministic line‐spectra. Thus, the climatology of the internal wave field and its slowly varying background can be inferred from line spectra filling the cusps around nonlinear tidal‐inertial harmonics, as suggested previously.