• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.115-124
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• 1997

We measured the variance of eddy diffusion and associated ‘diffusion coefficients’ in coastal regions of Korea by observing the separation distances among multiple drifters deployed simultaneously at the same initial position. The variance of eddy diffusion was found to be proportional to $t^m$, where t is the time and m is a non-integer scaling exponent between 1.5 and 3.5. The observed scaling exponent of eddy diffusion cannot be reproduced by diffusion models employing constant eddy diffusivity. In this study, we applied fractal theory in simulating exponential increase of variance of eddy diffusion. We employed the fGn(fractional Gaussian noise) as a ‘modified’ random walks corresponding to the oceanic eddy diffusion. The variance of eddy diffusion, which corresponds to the fBm(fractional Brown motion) of our diffusion model, is proportional to $t^{2H}$, where H is Hurst scaling exponent. The temporal increase of the variance. with scaling exponent between 1 and 2, was successfully reproduced by our fractal diffusion model. However, our model cannot reproduce scaling exponent greater than 2. The scaling exponents greater than 2 are associated with the velocity shear of the mean flow.