ALBERT

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2009. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 90 (2009): 1337-1350, doi:10.1175/2009BAMS2706.1.

Description: A major oceanographic field experiment is described, which is designed to observe, quantify, and understand the creation and dispersal of weakly stratified fluid known as “mode water” in the region of the Gulf Stream. Formed in the wintertime by convection driven by the most intense air–sea fluxes observed anywhere over the globe, the role of mode waters in the general circulation of the subtropical gyre and its biogeo-chemical cycles is also addressed. The experiment is known as the CLIVAR Mode Water Dynamic Experiment (CLIMODE). Here we review the scientific objectives of the experiment and present some preliminary results.

Description: Physical Oceanography program of NSF

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2022. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 39(7), (2022): 1053–1083, https://doi.org/10.1175/jtech-d-21-0167.1.

Description: The Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) on the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite will revolutionize satellite altimetry by measuring sea surface height (SSH) with unprecedented accuracy and resolution across two 50-km swaths separated by a 20-km gap. The original plan to provide an SSH product with a footprint diameter of 1 km has changed to providing two SSH data products with footprint diameters of 0.5 and 2 km. The swath-averaged standard deviations and wavenumber spectra of the uncorrelated measurement errors for these footprints are derived from the SWOT science requirements that are expressed in terms of the wavenumber spectrum of SSH after smoothing with a filter cutoff wavelength of 15 km. The availability of two-dimensional fields of SSH within the measurement swaths will provide the first spaceborne estimates of instantaneous surface velocity and vorticity through the geostrophic equations. The swath-averaged standard deviations of the noise in estimates of velocity and vorticity derived by propagation of the uncorrelated SSH measurement noise through the finite difference approximations of the derivatives are shown to be too large for the SWOT data products to be used directly in most applications, even for the coarsest footprint diameter of 2 km. It is shown from wavenumber spectra and maps constructed from simulated SWOT data that additional smoothing will be required for most applications of SWOT estimates of velocity and vorticity. Equations are presented for the swath-averaged standard deviations and wavenumber spectra of residual noise in SSH and geostrophically computed velocity and vorticity after isotropic two-dimensional smoothing for any user-defined smoother and filter cutoff wavelength of the smoothing.

Description: This research was supported by NASA Grant NNX16AH76G.

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 96 (2015): 1257–1279, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00015.1.

Description: Lateral stirring is a basic oceanographic phenomenon affecting the distribution of physical, chemical, and biological fields. Eddy stirring at scales on the order of 100 km (the mesoscale) is fairly well understood and explicitly represented in modern eddy-resolving numerical models of global ocean circulation. The same cannot be said for smaller-scale stirring processes. Here, the authors describe a major oceanographic field experiment aimed at observing and understanding the processes responsible for stirring at scales of 0.1–10 km. Stirring processes of varying intensity were studied in the Sargasso Sea eddy field approximately 250 km southeast of Cape Hatteras. Lateral variability of water-mass properties, the distribution of microscale turbulence, and the evolution of several patches of inert dye were studied with an array of shipboard, autonomous, and airborne instruments. Observations were made at two sites, characterized by weak and moderate background mesoscale straining, to contrast different regimes of lateral stirring. Analyses to date suggest that, in both cases, the lateral dispersion of natural and deliberately released tracers was O(1) m2 s–1 as found elsewhere, which is faster than might be expected from traditional shear dispersion by persistent mesoscale flow and linear internal waves. These findings point to the possible importance of kilometer-scale stirring by submesoscale eddies and nonlinear internal-wave processes or the need to modify the traditional shear-dispersion paradigm to include higher-order effects. A unique aspect of the Scalable Lateral Mixing and Coherent Turbulence (LatMix) field experiment is the combination of direct measurements of dye dispersion with the concurrent multiscale hydrographic and turbulence observations, enabling evaluation of the underlying mechanisms responsible for the observed dispersion at a new level.

Description: The bulk of this work was funded under the Scalable Lateral Mixing and Coherent Turbulence Departmental Research Initiative and the Physical Oceanography Program. The dye experiments were supported jointly by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation Physical Oceanography Program (Grants OCE-0751653 and OCE-0751734).

Description: 2016-02-01

Description: © The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Chelton, D. B., Schlax, M. G., Samelson, R. M., Farrar, J. T., Molemaker, M. J., McWilliams, J. C., & Gula, J. Prospects for future satellite estimation of small-scale variability of ocean surface velocity and vorticity. Progress in Oceanography, 173, (2019):256-350, doi:0.1016/j.pocean.2018.10.012.

Description: Recent technological developments have resulted in two techniques for estimating surface velocity with higher resolution than can be achieved from presently available nadir altimeter data: (1) Geostrophically computed estimates from high-resolution sea surface height (SSH) measured interferometrically by the wide-swath altimeter on the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission with a planned launch in 2021; and (2) Measurements of ocean surface velocity from a Doppler scatterometer mission that is in the early planning stages, referred to here as a Winds and Currents Mission (WaCM). In this study, we conduct an analysis of the effects of uncorrelated measurement errors and sampling errors on the errors of the measured and derived variables of interest (SSH and geostrophically computed velocity and vorticity for SWOT, and surface velocity and vorticity for WaCM). Our analysis includes derivations of analytical expressions for the variances and wavenumber spectra of the errors of the derived variables, which will be useful to other studies based on simulated SWOT and WaCM estimates of velocity and vorticity. We also discuss limitations of the geostrophic approximation that must be used for SWOT estimates of velocity. The errors of SWOT and WaCM estimates of velocity and vorticity at the full resolutions of the measured variables are too large for the unsmoothed estimates to be scientifically useful. It will be necessary to smooth the data to reduce the noise variance. We assess the resolution capabilities of smoothed estimates of velocity and vorticity from simulated noisy SWOT and WaCM data based on a high-resolution model of the California Current System (CCS). By our suggested minimum threshold signal-to-noise (S/N) variance ratio of 10 (a standard deviation ratio of 3.16), we conclude that the wavelength resolution capabilities of maps of velocity and vorticity constructed from WaCM data with a swath width of 1200 km are, respectively, about 60 km and 90 km in 4-day averages. For context, the radii of resolvable features are about four times smaller than these mesoscale wavelength resolutions. If the swath width can be increased to 1800 km, the wavelength resolution capabilities of 4-day average maps of surface velocity and vorticity would improve to about 45 km and 70 km, respectively. Reducing the standard deviation of the uncorrelated measurement errors from the baseline value of m s−1 to a value of 0.25 m s−1 would further improve these resolution capabilities to about 20 km and 45 km. SWOT data will allow mapping of the SSH field with far greater accuracy and space–time resolution than are presently achieved by merging the data from multiple nadir altimeter missions. However, because of its much narrower 120-km measurement swath compared with WaCM and the nature of the space–time evolution of the sampling pattern during each 21-day repeat of the SWOT orbit, maps of geostrophically computed velocity and vorticity averaged over the 14-day period that is required for SWOT to observe the full CCS model domain are contaminated by sampling errors that are too large for the estimates to be useful for any amount of smoothing considered here. Reducing the SSH measurement errors would do little to improve SWOT maps of velocity and vorticity. SWOT estimates of these variables are likely to be useful only within individual measurement swaths or with the help of dynamic interpolation from a data assimilation model. By our criterion, in-swath SWOT estimates of velocity and vorticity have wavelength resolution capabilities of about 30 km and 55 km, respectively. In comparison, in-swath estimates of velocity and vorticity from WaCM data with m s−1 have a wavelength resolution capability of about 130 km for both variables. Reducing the WaCM measurement errors to m s−1 would improve the resolution capabilities to about 50 km and 75 km for velocity and vorticity, respectively. These resolutions are somewhat coarser than the in-swath estimates from SWOT data, but the swath width is more than an order of magnitude wider for WaCM. Instantaneous maps of velocity and vorticity constructed in-swath from WaCM data will therefore be much less prone to edge effect problems in the spatially smoothed fields. Depending on the precise value of the threshold adopted for the minimum S/N ratio and on the details of the filter used to smooth the SWOT and WaCM data, the resolution capabilities summarized above may be somewhat pessimistic. On the other hand, aspects of measurement errors and sampling errors that have not been accounted for in this study will worsen the resolution capabilities presented here. Another caveat to keep in mind is that the resolution capabilities deduced here from simulations of the CCS region during summertime may differ somewhat at other times of year and in other geographical regions where the signal variances and wavenumber spectra of the variables of interest differ from the CCS model used in this study. Our analysis nonetheless provides useful guidelines for the resolutions that can be expected from SWOT and WaCM.

Description: We thank Ralph Milliff, Bo Qiu, Ernesto Rodríguez and Lee-Lueng Fu for many helpful editorial comments and suggestions that improved the manuscript. This research was funded by NASA Grants NNX13AD78G, NNX14AM72G, NNX13AE32G, NNX14AM66G, NNX16AH76G,NNX14AM71G and NNX17AH54G. The two North Atlantic Ocean simulations in this study were performed using HPC resources from GENCI-TGCC with support from Grant 2017-A0010107638 for Jonathan Gula.

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Physical Oceanography 45 (2015): 104–132, doi:10.1175/JPO-D-14-0032.1.

Description: Three mechanisms for self-induced Ekman pumping in the interiors of mesoscale ocean eddies are investigated. The first arises from the surface stress that occurs because of differences between surface wind and ocean velocities, resulting in Ekman upwelling and downwelling in the cores of anticyclones and cyclones, respectively. The second mechanism arises from the interaction of the surface stress with the surface current vorticity gradient, resulting in dipoles of Ekman upwelling and downwelling. The third mechanism arises from eddy-induced spatial variability of sea surface temperature (SST), which generates a curl of the stress and therefore Ekman pumping in regions of crosswind SST gradients. The spatial structures and relative magnitudes of the three contributions to eddy-induced Ekman pumping are investigated by collocating satellite-based measurements of SST, geostrophic velocity, and surface winds to the interiors of eddies identified from their sea surface height signatures. On average, eddy-induced Ekman pumping velocities approach O(10) cm day−1. SST-induced Ekman pumping is usually secondary to the two current-induced mechanisms for Ekman pumping. Notable exceptions are the midlatitude extensions of western boundary currents and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, where SST gradients are strong and all three mechanisms for eddy-induced Ekman pumping are comparable in magnitude. Because the polarity of current-induced curl of the surface stress opposes that of the eddy, the associated Ekman pumping attenuates the eddies. The decay time scale of this attenuation is proportional to the vertical scale of the eddy and inversely proportional to the wind speed. For typical values of these parameters, the decay time scale is about 1.3 yr.

Description: This work was funded by NASA Grants NNX08AI80G, NNX08AR37G, NNX13AD78G, NNX10AE91G, NNX13AE47G, and NNX10AO98G.

Description: 2015-07-01

Description: © The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Rodriguez, E., Bourassa, M., Chelton, D., Farrar, J. T., Long, D., Perkovic-Martin, D., & Samelson, R. The winds and currents mission concept. Frontiers in Marine Science, 6, (2019): 438, doi:10.3389/fmars.2019.00438.

Description: The Winds and Currents Mission (WaCM) is a proposed approach to meet the need identified by the NRC Decadal Survey for the simultaneous measurements of ocean vector winds and currents. WaCM features a Ka-band pencil-beam Doppler scatterometer able to map ocean winds and currents globally. We review the principles behind the WaCM measurement and the requirements driving the mission. We then present an overview of the WaCM observatory and tie its capabilities to other OceanObs reviews and measurement approaches.

Description: ER was funded under NASA grant NNN13D462T. DC was funded under NASA grant NNX10AO98G. JF was funded under NASA grants NNX14AM71G and NNX16AH76G. DL was funded under NASA grant NNX14AM67G. DP-M was funded under NASA grant NNH13ZDA001N. RS was funded under NASA grant NNX14AM66G.