Unsupervised Clustering of Argo Temperature and Salinity Profiles in the
Mid-latitude Northwest Pacific Ocean and Revealed Influence of the
Kuroshio Extension Variability on the Vertical Structure Distribution
Abstract
In the mid-latitude Northwest Pacific Ocean, subtropical and subarctic
waters meet, intermingle, and mix to form multiple ocean domains
characterized by a variety of unique oceanographic structures. The
majority of previous studies on the characteristics and distribution of
these ocean structures were based on existing definitions of the
structure and water mass of interest derived from spatiotemporally
limited data. With the massive amount of data accumulated by Argo and a
small spatiotemporal bias, data-driven scientific methods may be able to
objectively recapture the ocean structure. In this study, we used
unsupervised clustering to analyze the temperature and salinity profiles
from Argo float in the mid-latitude Northwest Pacific Ocean, and the
results were compared to previous knowledge of ocean structure. The
results showed that classes were distributed to form specific regions
and each class has different oceanographic features that generally
correspond to the previously described regional divisions. A striking
advantage of this new method is that it quantifies the relative
abundance of each class of profiles on a 1° grid. Furthermore, we
discovered that the dynamic state of Kuroshio Extension affects the
distribution of some classes and the percentage of profiles that are
robust to clustering. This suggests that the stability of the Kuroshio
Extension flow path has an effect on the distribution of ocean
structure. These findings suggest that unsupervised clustering is useful
in the analysis of oceanographic structures, allowing us to investigate
oceanographic structures in areas that have not previously been
extensively studied.