Project description
Deciphering the energy cascade of ocean mixing
The Earth’s climate is governed by a global conveyor belt of water, with large-scale currents transporting heat and nutrients across the planet. The energy required to sustain this motion depends on turbulent mixing at the millimetre scale. However, the process by which massive tidal forces break down into tiny, heat-dispersing eddies remains a mystery. Current climate models often rely on an empirical patchwork of approximations, leading to uncertainty in long-term forecasting. The ERC-funded OPPIWaM project aims to replace these guesses with a physics-first understanding of the ocean’s interior. It focuses on internal waves, which act as the primary conduit for energy. The planned result is a roadmap of the energy flow from the surface to the abyss.
Objective
Oceanic Physics-based Parameterizations of Internal Wave-driven Mixing (OPPIWaM) tackles one of the most pressing open problems in physical oceanography: how energy cascades toward the small scales to fuel turbulent mixing, one of the main drivers of the large-scale overturning circulation with huge impacts on the Earth’s climate. Mixing scales are below the resolution of ocean circulation models, and the current parameterizations are static and empirical, resulting in high uncertainty in model outputs.
Internal waves (IWs) represent the crucial conduit of energy from the large-scale forcings, such as winds or tides, down to the mixing scales. A grand challenge to upgrade the models’ quality is to leverage the physical properties of this IW interscale energy hub to reach a quantitative understanding of mixing based on the ocean’s equations instead of on empirical numbers.
To do so, OPPIWaM sets up an unprecedented multilevel investigation of the physics of IW-driven mixing, with three main objectives: 1. Develop a first-principle solver for the IW interscale dynamics; 2. Develop reduced-model dynamical approximations to provide interpretation as opposed to a black-box package; 3. Constrain the first-principle and reduced-model dynamics with high-resolution field studies and global observational datasets. Finally, OPPIWaM’s findings will integrate into a dynamical first-principle component ready for implementation in the models. The groundbreaking approach to achieve the objectives hinges upon concurring revolutions in theory (wave turbulence recent breakthroughs), (clustering and equation learning) algorithmic efficiency and availability, and (Argo-led) ocean-observation paradigm change.
High stakes for climate and cutting-edge theoretical, numerical and observational challenges make OPPIWaM’s objectives ambitious. Right timing and PI’s key experience and positioning within nonlinear waves and ocean mixing communities make OPPIWaM’s ambitious objectives achievable.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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10124 Torino
Italy
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