Yuri V. Lvov and Naoto Yokoyama
Department of Mathematical Sciences,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, New York 12180 USA
To investigate formation mechanism of energy spectra,
direct numerical simulations of oceanic internal waves
based on a dynamic equation
are performed.
Our simulations demonstrate that the resulting energy spectra in inertial regions
are not universal.
Instead,
energy accumulates in the horizontally longest waves.
We provide evidence that
formation of energy spectra in inertial regions
is dominated by scale-separated interactions with this accumulation at the longest waves.
These nonlocal interactions in the wavenumber space make it questionable
that a universal spectrum might be observed in direct numerical simulations.
Implications of these findings to the real
oceans and universal oceanographic spectrum are discussed.
