Exciting INTERNAL WAVES

So, a bit of a random post, but I just had to write something because research is actually blowing my mind right now (as per usual for grad students, I go through ups and downs with research motivation/insight).

Have you ever wondered what cool thing created the background on this blog? It seems like something a rainbow-obsessed 12-year-old would come up with, right? Well, actually, it's a MATLAB pcolor plot of the turbulent dissipation rate from a series of SCAMP profiles I took as part of the Monterey Bay LatMix field campaign in July of 2010. [If the last sentence meant nothing to you, don't worry, you're not expected to know what the ridiculous alphabet soup of physical oceanography is, you're not missing anything]. Effectively, this is my thesis data. It's showing how much energy is being injected into the water by the waves passing through it.

What's exciting me ridiculously right now is the plot below. I've been working on trying to show that a simple scaling factor derived from moored temperature data can be used to determine when mixing in the water column is likely due to the passage of internal waves. Usually we'd have to use a SCAMP-like instrument. This could be a really useful tool. What this plot shows is the temperature data (top) and the scaling factor (bottom). You can see the potentially unstable region in the bottom plot, which happens to match really well with the theoretical shear instability profile for IWs. YAY IT WORKS!!!!!!