Ocean Turbulence, Boundary Conditions and Climate: connecting theory with observations.

The boundary conditions for water in a tank are well known, but theories about the ocean circulation or geophysical flows in general do not and cannot consider individual molecules. Instead they discuss volumes of liquids or gas, and it is not clear anymore what the boundary conditions should be; mostly they are inferred from tank experiments or direct numerical simulations. However, even the most ambitious of these have Reynolds numbers of some 100,000, whereas in the ocean this ratio between nonlinear and viscous forces is typically two to three orders of magnitude larger.
  Here, we will exploit a unique geographic setting in a fjord to directly observe oceanic flow with a Reynolds number of approximately 10,000,000, and see how this flow interacts with the steep sidewalls. The boundary conditions and turbulence closures derived from these observations will be implemented in a global ocean model.