Estimation of the Reflection of Internal Tides on a Slope

Reflection occurs when internal tides impact on a steep continental slope. Separating reflected internal tide signals from incident ones is crucial to develop the parameterization of internal tide-driven turbulent mixing on the continental slopes. In this study, the performances of three different methods for estimating internal tide reflections are examined by using two different cases. The Hilbert transform-based method is found to be more suitable than two other methods for both cases considered in this study. The two other methods are effective for westward-propagating mode-1 internal tides impacting a slope, but inappropriate in the case where internal tides radiate from a Gaussian ridge impact the slope because of their inaccurate estimation of incident internal tides in the latter case. Such inaccurate estimation further influences the extraction of reflected signals and calculation of the reflected and cross term of energy fluxes. In addition, it should be noted that, due to the use of filtering, the method based on Hilbert transform may result in slight bias when assessing the incident and reflected signals near topographic features.