This may indicate a vertical shear, since the mean depth of the floats was about 300 meters less than the tracer. 3-D modelling, with accurate bathymetry will be necessary to extract most of the useful information out of these surveys. These motions appear to be generated as the barotropic tide flows over bathymetric features having characteristic wavelengths smaller than 10 km. The subsequent propogation and breaking of the internal tide allows the enhancement of turbulent dissipation well away from the bottom boundary. The goal of the work is to predeict the vertical profile of turbulent dissipation given the amplitude of the barotrpic tide and a horizontal spectrum of bottom topography.
Preliminary results are encouraging.