The Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite mission now delivers global sea surface height (SSH) observations at scales fine enough to resolve submesoscale eddies (<50 km). At these scales, the traditional geostrophic approximation, commonly used to infer surface currents from SSH, no longer holds. Here, we present a new dynamical framework that diagnoses ageostrophic currents and, in particular, divergent motions directly from SSH. The framework is trained and validated using a high‐resolution numerical simulation of a western boundary current system, where submesoscale eddies are the most energetic. This approach highlights the unique capability to reveal vertical motions in the upper ocean from SSH, allowing for diagnosing transport of heat, carbon, oxygen, and nutrients between the surface and the interior of the ocean.
SWOT resolves sea surface height at spatial scales where geostrophic balance may break down and ageostrophic motions become significant, making identification of the transition scale essential. We test whether wind generated waves provide an independent diagnostic of this transition. WAVEWATCH III was forced with high...
N. Violante-Carvalho, Thiago Paula, Felipe Marques dos Santos et al.· Geophysical Research Letters· 0 citations
Mesoscale eddies in the Southern Ocean extend from the surface to the deep ocean and contribute to regional and global ocean heat budgets. However, sparse in situ observations have limited estimates of eddy meridional heat transport (EMHT) to the near surface, leaving deep-ocean processes poorly understood. Here we qua...
Tong-Ya Liu, Xiao-Ming Zhai, Qingyou He et al.· Nature Communications· 0 citations
This study presents a novel cyclostrophic balance correction method for estimating submesoscale ocean surface currents in the Northern Arabian Sea using surface water and ocean topography (SWOT) mission altimetry. High-resolution Ocean Color Monitor (OCM-3) data from the EOS-06 satellite reveal fine-scale eddies and fi...
Neeraj Agarwal, Aditya Chaudhary, J. M. et al.· IEEE Journal of Selected Top...· 0 citations
Utilizing two-dimensional sea level anomalies from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) wide-swath altimeter, we conduct a global census of fine-scale eddies (with equivalent radii < 30 km) that are beyond the resolution capacity of traditional altimeters. We find that these eddies are concentrated in regions...
