Four meridional transects of the turbulent dissipation rate ϵ and of shear were taken across the equator along 140¿W in late 1984. Averaging the upper 110 m of the transects, we found that the vertically averaged ϵ as well as shear showed maximum values with ¿1¿ latitude. Because a strong diurnal cycle of ϵ aliased the measurements, we cannot extract spatial variations with good accuracy. However, when ϵ is separated into the contributions from the thermocline and from the surface mixed layer, consistent patterns emerge. In the thermocline, ϵ was strongest where the Richardson number was lowest, i.e., near the equator-consistent with the production of turbulence by the shear of the undercurrent. In the surface mixed layer near the equator, ϵ was usually larger than predicted by similarity scaling, but the discrepancy varied with the diurnal cycle of shear. When the mean shear was low, after prolonged mixing by nighittime convection, ϵ was close to the similarity scaling. We therefore attribute the excess dissipation to shear production. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1989