11.07.12: Origin of the water mass inside the eddy during BIOLINCS using AVISO SSHΒΆ
Fig. 1 contains an animation of the past distribution of parcels that are inside the eddy during BIOLINCS. Trajectories have been calculated by using the surface geostrophic flow from satellite sea surface height (SSH). The animation runs into the past. The lower panel shows how many parcels are still inside the eddy after some days into the past. The edge of the eddy is defined by fitting a Gaussian to the SSHA. Notice that I perform the calculation starting from different days of the BIOLINCS period and all results are nearly the same.
My conclusion is that most of the water started to form and to conglomerate inside the eddy about 300-350 days before BIOLINCS when the eddy was around 152W and 26N.
Figure 1: Past distribution of parcels located within the eddy during BIOLINCS. Trajectories have been calculated by using the surface geostrophic flow from satellite sea surface height (SSH). In the upper panel, the grey shading is SSHA. The red line indicates the past trajectory of eddy with the numbers indicating the number of days in the past it corresponds to. The red circle is the edge of the eddy defined by fitting a Gaussian to the SSHA map. The blue dots show the position of parcels. The yellow dot and circle shows the mean position of the parcel and a measure of their horizontal spreading. The movie is running into the past with the number of days into the past indicating in the title. In the lower panel is shows the time series of the percentage of parcels that are still inside the eddy defined by the red circle in the upper panel. The time series run from the past to the left to the time of the BIOLINCS observations (day=0) to the right. The moving vertical dashed line indicates the time of the snapshot of the upper panel.
computed with plot_SSH_analysis_2.m in RESEARCH/PROJECTS/MARINE_BIOLOGY/SUBMESOSCALE_PROCESSES/BIOLINCS on the main disk.