Lagrangian Filtering: A novel method for separating internal waves from
non-wave flows in high-resolution simulations
Abstract
Identifying internal waves in complex flow fields is a long-standing
problem in fluid dynamics, oceanography and atmospheric science, owing
to the overlap of internal waves temporal and spatial scales with other
flow regimes. Lagrangian filtering — that is, temporal filtering in a
frame of reference moving with the flow — is one proposed methodology
for performing this separation. Here we (i) describe a new
implementation of the Lagrangian filtering methodology and (ii)
introduce a freely available, parallelised Python package that applies
the method. We show that the package can be used to directly filter
output from a variety of common ocean models including MITgcm, ROMS and
MOM5 for both regional and global domains at high resolution. The
Lagrangian filtering is shown to be a useful tool to both identify (and
thereby quantify) internal waves, and to remove internal waves to
isolate the ‘balanced’ flow field.