Lagrangian coherent structures, transport and chaotic mixing in simple kinematic ocean models

Methods of dynamical system’s theory are used for numerical study of transport and mixing of passive particles (water masses, temperature, salinity, pollutants, etc.) in simple kinematic ocean models composed with the main Eulerian coherent structures in a randomly fluctuating ocean—a jet-like current and an eddy. Advection of passive tracers in a periodically-driven flow consisting of a background stream and an eddy (the model inspired by the phenomenon of topographic eddies over mountains in the ocean and atmosphere) is analyzed as an example of chaotic particle’s scattering and transport. A numerical analysis reveals a non-attracting chaotic invariant set Λ that determines scattering and trapping of particles from the incoming flow. It is shown that both the trapping time for particles in the mixing region and the number of times their trajectories wind around the vortex have hierarchical fractal structure as functions of the initial particle’s coordinates. Scattering functions are singular on a Cantor set of initial conditions, and this property should manifest itself by strong fluctuations of quantities measured in experiments. The Lagrangian structures in our numerical experiments are shown to be similar to those found in a recent laboratory dye experiment at Woods Hole. Transport and mixing of passive particles is studied in the kinematic model inspired by the interaction of a current (like the Gulf Stream or the Kuroshio) with an eddy in a noisy environment. We demonstrate a non-trivial phenomenon of noise-induced clustering of passive particles and propose a method to find such clusters in numerical experiments. These clusters are patches of advected particles which can move together in a random velocity field for comparatively long time. The clusters appear due to existence of regions of stability in the phase space which is the physical space in the advection problem.