Lawrence Wendy B.

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Lawrence
First Name
Wendy B.
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  • Thesis
    Measurements of a barotropic planetary vorticity mode in an eddy-resolving quasi-geostrophic model using acoustic tomography
    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1988-08) Lawrence, Wendy B.
    A tomographic array is placed in a 2-layer, flat bottom, steady-wind driven quasi-geostrophic circulation model to investigate whether the analysis of acoustic travel time changes can detect large-scale barotropic oscillations. Time series of sea surface elevation and upper and lower layer meridional currents are generated for comparison against a series of acoustic travel times. The spectra of these time series exhibit a broad mesoscale peak near a period of 40 days. The spectrum of the acoustic travel time contains a significant peak due to a resonant barotropic oscillation with a period of 28.6 days which is not present in the spectra of the point measurements. In this numerical model, basin-scale tomographic measurements are a better method of sensing the large-scale resonant barotropic oscillations than are conventional point measurements because the tomographic system attenuates the "noise" from the mesoscale.