Lagrangian transport by convectively breaking shoaling internal solitary waves with recirculating turbulent cores.*

This presentation discusses the first set of results on Lagrangian particle entrainment, transport, and detrainment, during internal solitary wave (ISW) shoaling over realistic gentle bathymetric slopes in the South China Sea. The shoaling ISWs are subject to convective breaking and, in conjunction with the near-surface shear structure of the background current, develop a subsurface recirculating core. The present work-in-progress focuses on the one-way coupling of a high-accuracy/resolution massively parallel 3D non-linear non-hydrostatic flow solver (Diamantopoulos et al. (Ocean Modelling, 2022)) with a high-accuracy particle-tracking scheme of Jacobs et al. (Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 2007). Preliminary results shown here aim to identify the trajectories of neutrally buoyant Lagrangian particles in both 2-D and 3-D simulations and link them to Eulerian analysis of the structure of the turbulent core. Particular attention will be devoted to a qualitative-based outline of the recirculating core as contrasted to the classic u_max/c metrics.