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Topological Feature Tracking for Submesoscale Eddies
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  • Sam Voisin,
  • Jay Hineman,
  • James Bruce Polly,
  • Gary Koplik,
  • Ken Ball,
  • Paul Bendich,
  • Joseph D`Addezio,
  • Gregg A Jacobs,
  • Tamay M. M. Ozgokmen
Sam Voisin
Geometric Data Analytics
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Jay Hineman
Geometric Data Analytics
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James Bruce Polly
Geometric Data Analytics, Inc.

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Gary Koplik
Geometric Data Analytics
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Ken Ball
Geometric Data Analytics
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Paul Bendich
Geometric Data Analytics
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Joseph D`Addezio
Naval Research Laboratory Ocean Dynamics & Prediction Branch
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Gregg A Jacobs
Naval Research Laboratory
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Tamay M. M. Ozgokmen
University of Miami
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Abstract

Current state-of-the art procedures for studying modeled submesoscale oceanographic features have made a strong assumption of independence between features identified at different times. Therefore, all submesoscale eddies identified in a time series were studied in aggregate. Statistics from these methods are illuminating but oversample identified features and cannot determine the lifetime evolution of the transient submesoscale processes. To this end, the authors apply the Topological Feature Tracking (TFT) algorithm to the problem of identifying and tracking submesoscale eddies over time. TFT allows a user to identify submesoscale eddies as critical points on a set of time-ordered scalar fields and associate the points between consecutive timesteps. The procedure yields tracklets which represent spatio-temporal displacement of eddies. Thus the time-dependent behavior of submesoscale eddies can be studied. We analyze the submesoscale eddy dataset produced by TFT, which yields unique, time-varying statistics on this currently underexplored phenomenon.