Ocean Eddies: Hot spots for air-sea intercations and water masses
(trans)formations
Abstract
Mesoscale eddies are ubiquitous in the ocean, and typically exhibit
different characteristics to their surroundings, allowing them to
transport properties such as heat, salt and carbon around the ocean.
This takes place everywhere in the world’s ocean and at all latitude
bands. Most of mesoscale eddies energy is generated by instabilities of
the mean flow, and by air-sea interactions. Mesoscale dynamics can feed
energy and momentum back into the mean flow and help drive the deep
ocean circulation. Their suspected importance in transporting and mixing
water properties as they propagate in the ocean, play a significant role
in the global budgets of these tracers and climate. Increasing evidences
point out at intense air-sea interaction at smaller scale than
synoptical, especially in the extratropics that can strongly affect the
Troposphere. However we do not have yet neither a global quantitative
assessments nor a theoretical understanding of these processes. We will
present new results from a recently developed eddy-atlas (ToEddies) that
includes eddies merging and splitting. In particular, we will discuss
properties of Agulhas Rings in the South Atlantic derived from satellite
altimetry and the colocalization of these eddies with Argo floats. Our
results show that these eddies are, in the South Atlantic, associated
with strong thermal and haline anomalies. These are essentially due to
Mode Waters (Agulhas Rings Mode Water: ARMW) formed in the core of the
rings in the southeastern Cape Basin, just west of the Agulhas
Retroflection, after intense air-sea interactions that can last for more
than an entire season. These eddies are then advected in the South
Atlantic and are responsible of an important flux of heat and salt into
this basin (Laxenaire et al. 2018a,b). We corroborate such findings with
full depth hydrography of selected eddies and very high-resolution
modelling studies.