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Official Journal of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS)

Fig. 12 | Geoscience Letters

Fig. 12

From: A survey of submesoscale currents

Fig. 12

Filament spectrum during frontal arrest. The associated along-front horizontal-wavenumber \(k_y\) spectrum of turbulent kinetic energy E(k) and its vertical-velocity w component in the center of the filament at the time of frontal arrest (\(t = 6\) h; Sullivan and McWilliams 2018). The spectrum peak is associated with a lateral shear instability whose eddy momentum flux, \(\langle u' v' \rangle\), arrests the frontogenesis by the mean secondary circulation. It is accompanied by a forward cascade of energy to microscale dissipation with a characteristic spectrum slope \(\propto \ k_y^{-\,5/3}\). This is for the same simulation as in Fig. 9 (Sullivan and McWilliams 2018)

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