Scaling the Diurnal Mixing/Mixed Layer Depth in the Tropical Ocean: A Case Study in the South China Sea

Abstract The diurnal cycling of the surface mixing/mixed layer (ML) depth, air‐sea heat flux, and vertical profiles of the temperature and turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate in the tropical central South China Sea was observed in summer (June 2017) and winter (January 2018). In the daytime, solar heating warmed and stabilized the ML, and the thickness of the ML can be well characterized by the Zilitinkevich scale as noted in previous studies. By contrast, in the nighttime the ML was deepened by convective turbulence generated by surface cooling. Guided by these observations, we have derived a simple scaling for the nighttime deepening of the ML by simplifying the classic Kraus‐Turner type model. We show that the variation of the ML depth can be scaled by a function of the wind speed, air‐sea heat flux and the temporal variation of the sea surface temperature, all of which are observable variables at the sea surface. It is found that the scaling works well in reproducing observed variations of the ML depth from hydrographic data. As such, this study advances our understanding of the response of the upper ocean to atmospheric forcing and provides a simple way for predicting the ML depth with solely surface observations.