Abstract
This study presents an assessment of the transport of suspended material
by surface ocean currents, which have a critical role in determining the
connectivity and distribution of living and non-living material.
Lagrangian experiments reveal pathways from the Equatorial Atlantic to
ten strategic regions within the Caribbean Sea, determined by
considering the space-time variability of climatological Lagrangian
Coherent Structures, which act as recurrent attracting pathways and
transport barriers. Due to windage or Stokes drift, wind forcing is a
significant factor in determining the spatial locations where particles
cluster and the time needed to reach the Caribbean from the Equatorial
Atlantic. Pathways shift westward within the Caribbean and take less
time to arrive with increasing wind influence. Depending on the wind
effect, the particles show higher confluence in different areas of the
Caribbean. A case study is presented for the Mexican Caribbean nearshore
area, isolated from ocean-current trajectories. Here, wind weakens the
transport barrier responsible for this isolation and causes particle
confluence towards that region. Spatial patterns of the Eulerian
velocity identified through Self-Organizing Maps, with time dependence
given by their best matching units, can reproduce the characteristic
Lagrangian patterns of surface current climate variability. Our study
demonstrates the application of tools from dynamical systems and
unsupervised neural networks to understand Lagrangian patterns and
identify the processes that drive them. These findings improve our
understanding of transport mechanisms of suspended material by surface
ocean currents in the Western Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, which is
essential for managing and conserving marine ecosystems.