COMCEPTS

Combined Ocean Mixing Course, Experiments, and Practices for Turbulence Sampling

September 2 - 19, 2025 @Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Thinking about ocean turbulence too much and want to understand it more? With the support of UC Ship Funds, a group of senior grad students are running a summer school on measuring ocean mixing - both directly through microstructure profilers and indirectly through measurements of ocean currents and density. 

This will be a 3-week workshop from September 1 - 19, 2025 where students will learn the basics of ocean turbulence, conduct a research project examining outflow from the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant, and analyze measurements made on day trips aboard the R/V Sproul. 

FieldworK

The course includes both lectures as well as fieldwork. The first and last week of the course will be held at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and be classroom based with lectures and group work. The middle week consists of 5 individual fieldwork days where students will gain experience sampling ocean turbulence using various methods aboard the R/V Sproul. The fieldwork will take place in the vicinity of San Diego harbor/Pt Loma. No special gear is required for the fieldwork and lunch and snacks will be provided aboard the ship.

topics covered in this course

  • Introduction to turbulent flow in the ocean
    •What is turbulence?
    •What does turbulence look like in the ocean?
    We’ll discuss: length scales, turbulence cascade, instabilities and the effects of stratification

  • Quantifying turbulence with
    •Dissipation rates of momentum (epsilon) and temperature variance (chi)
    •Reynolds stress

  • Measuring and computing turbulence with
    •CTDs
    •ADCP/ ADVs
    •Microstructure profilers (shear probes and fast thermistors). Check out the instruments we’ll be using here!
    Inferring quantities such as diffusivity and heat fluxes from measurements

    + Doing your own analysis using ship data from the R/V Sproul!




Remote attendance

In the spirit of knowledge sharing and making things accessible, we will make most of the lectures in this course available to anyone and stream them live on Zoom. Please note however that the course was designed to be in person and thus some lectures will involve boardwork and group discussions that might not translate well to the remote format. The schedule below show the topics covered and lectures held in week 1 and 3 of the course (the second week of the course is fieldwork only). Times are in Pacific Daylight Time (UTC/GMT-7). Any schedule item marked in green will be live-streamed at the following Zoom link (with password) found below.

Zoom link

Meeting id: 941 1973 2894. Password: turbulence


We are no longer receiving applications for the full course and the cruise is fully booked. However, if you are interested in attending the lectures in person, please reach out to Ankitha (akannad@ucsd.edu) or Andrea (anr009@ucsd.edu) for more info. We also welcome remote attendance via Zoom for parts of the course.

We look forward to learning with you!
Your COMCEPTS 2025 organizers
Andrea Rodriguez-Marin Freudmann, Ankitha Kannad, Caique Dias Luko, Helen Zhang, Charlotte Bellerjeau and Kerstin Bergentz