An integral balance is developed for steady fluid flows relating dissipation in volumes bounded by iso-surfaces of a tracer (quasi-conserved quality) and solid boundaries to the covariance of the tracer value and surface fluxes across the boundaries. The balance is to be used to estimate some aspects of the structure of presumed vertical eddy diffusion coefficients for temperature and salinity in the ocean.
The dissipation integral is also applied to prove four related theorems. The Prandtl-Batchelor Theorem is a special case of one of these theorems. The theorems are applied to show that it is consistent to assume that the ocean salinity distribution is in a steady state, with turbulent transfer down-gradient and no other internal sources or sinks.
Complete copies of this report are available from:
Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies
last update: 5 January 1998
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