A new sea surface height-based code for oceanic mesoscale eddy tracking

• Published in: Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology
• Main Authors: Mason, Evan, Pascual, Ananda, McWilliams, James C.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Meteorological Society 2014
• Subjects: South pacific ocean; Ocean dynamics; Eddies; Atlantic Ocean; Altimetry; Remote sensing; Pacific; Northeast Atlantic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/99518; https://doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-14-00019.1

This paper presents a software tool that enables the identification and automated tracking of oceanic eddies observed with satellite altimetry in user-specified regions throughout the global ocean. As input, the code requires sequential maps of sea level anomalies such as those provided by Archiving, Validation, and Interpretation of Satellite Oceanographic (AVISO) data. Outputs take the form of (i) data files containing eddy properties, including position, radius, amplitude, and azimuthal (geostrophic) speed; and (ii) sequential image maps showing sea surface height maps with active eddy centers and tracks overlaid. The results given are from a demonstration in the Canary Basin region of the northeast Atlantic and are comparable with a published global eddy track database. Some discrepancies between the two datasets include eddy radius magnitude, and the distributions of eddy births and deaths. The discrepancies may be related to differences in the eddy identification methods, and also possibly to differences in the smoothing of the sea surface height maps. The code is written in Python and is made freely available under a GNU license (http://www.imedea.uib.es/users/ emason/py-eddy-tracker/). © 2014 American Meteorological Society. Evan Mason is supported by a Spanish government JAE Doc grant (CSIC), cofinanced by FSE. This work has been partially funded by the project MyOcean-2 EU FP7 Peer Reviewed