The scope and approach of the ATOMIX wiki

The ATOMIX wiki is a resource being created for SCOR working group 160, which was approved by the Scientific Committee of Ocean Research. This wiki being designed to help newcomers learn more about turbulence processing, in particular estimating the Turbulent kinetic energy dissipation [math]\displaystyle{ \varepsilon }[/math] from velocity based measurements.

This wiki is all about collecting the best quality turbulence dissipation rate [math]\displaystyle{ \varepsilon }[/math] data possible. This is an important quantity in understanding how the ocean works at a range of scales.

The challenge is – while new technology makes it easy to collect the raw data that make [math]\displaystyle{ \varepsilon }[/math] estimation possible - the extraction of quality [math]\displaystyle{ \varepsilon }[/math] from these raw data is not simple.

With the growing array of hardware able to collect these data it’s in everyone’s interests for these numbers to be as reliable as possible. We focus on three particular approaches - this may expand in the future but the present choices are common approaches. These three individual processing guidelines share the same Nomenclature and data format attributes.

If you are new to ocean turbulence this wiki will give you the tools to help understand the processing steps and terminology. And then – primarily – it provides a way to test your analysis methodology with well-studied benchmark datasets so you have a measure of how good your approach is.

It is not a “turbulence analysis package” – that’s not in our scope or purpose.

If you are experienced with one kind of turbulence instrument and are embarking on working with other approaches, this wiki will be a short-cut to building on what you already know.

It can be used at any stage in the process – from experiment design, through collection and then primarily the analysis. Like any good recipe it is worth looking at before embarking.

The wiki format means the knowledge base and datasets will continue to grow and provide an evolving resource and a way to connect with the turbulence community.

A peer-review period will be advertised in 2022 that will be open to the ocean mixing community at large.

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