Abstract/Summary

Because it allows a rigorous separation between reversible and irreversible processes, the concept of available potential energy (APE) has become central to the study of turbulent stratified fluids. In ocean modelling, it is fundamental to the parameterisation of meso-scale ocean eddies and of the turbulent mixing of heat and salt. However, how to apply APE theory consistently to local or regional subdomains has been a longstanding source of confusion due to the globally defined Lorenz reference state entering the definition of APE and of buoyancy forces being generally thought to be meaningless in those cases. In practice, this is often remedied by introducing heuristic `localised' forms of APE density depending uniquely on region-specific reference states, possibly diverging significantly from the global Lorenz reference state. In this paper, we argue that across-scale energy transfers can only be consistently described if localised forms of APE density are defined as the eddy APE component of an exact mean/eddy decomposition of the APE density, for which a new physically more intuitive and mathematically simpler framework is proposed. The eddy APE density thus defined exhibits a much weaker dependency on the global Lorenz reference state than the mean APE, in agreement with physical intuition, but with a different structure than that of existing heuristic localised APE forms. Our framework establishes a rigorous physical basis for linking parameterised energy transfers to molecular viscous and diffusive dissipation rates. We illustrate its potential usefulness by discussing the energetics implications of standard advective and diffusive parameterisations of the turbulent density flux, which reveals potential new sources of numerical instability in ocean models.