Estimating the Kinetic Energy Spectrum from the Second-Order Velocity Structure Function using a Regularized Fitting Approach

Abstract Ocean turbulence plays a key role in shaping large-scale circulation, heat uptake, and biogeochemical processes. The kinetic energy (KE) wavenumber spectrum is a fundamental diagnostic, quantifying how KE is distributed across spatial scales. The second-order structure function—computed from velocity differences between spatially separated observations—provides a complementary measure, but unlike the KE spectrum, it reflects a non-local, weighted integral of KE over all scales. Analytic relationships link the two metrics, permitting forward and inverse transformations between them. However, recovering the KE spectrum from the structure function via the inverse relationship is highly sensitive to sampling limitations and numerical discretization errors. Here we propose a regularized approach in which the spectrum is assumed to consist of a finite number of segments with distinct slopes and amplitudes, and the inversion is formulated as an optimization problem. The approach is first validated in an idealized setting; for a number of idealized KE spectra with prescribed sets of spectral slopes and amplitudes, the corresponding structure functions are computed by numerically evaluating the forward relationship. These structure functions are then used to determine the underlying parameters using our proposed approach, which shows that we are able to perfectly recover the parameters and consequently the KE spectra. The method is further evaluated on high-resolution ocean model output, where it reconstructs the underlying spectra well even in the presence of noise. Finally, we apply the method to surface drifter observations (GLAD and LASER experiments). The results show that the framework enables estimation of the KE spectrum from sparse Lagrangian data, extending spectral diagnostics beyond gridded Eulerian measurements.