Tracking the PRIME eddy using satellite altimetry

• Published in: Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography
• Main Authors: Wade, Ian P., Heywood, Karen J.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2001
• Subjects: Hatton Bank; Iceland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/31470/; https://doi.org/10.1016/S0967-0645(00)00094-1

The PRIME cruise to the North Atlantic during June/July 1996 surveyed and sampled an extremely vigorous and deep-reaching eddy with a significant barotropic component. Although it exhibited anticyclonic flow and featured a warm core at depth, it had been capped at some point during its lifetime, so appeared as a cold feature in the upper 500 m. Satellite-derived sea-surface temperatures(SST) showed it to have moved little during the few weeks prior to the cruise. In this paper we discuss the origin of the PRIME eddy including where and when it is likely to have formed. Consistently large amounts of cloud cover restrict the use of SST imagery to track such features. Altimetry provides a better method to trace this eddy back in time and space since microwave radiation is not significantly affected by cloud cover. Sea-level anomaly (SLA) data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON and European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites were used. Results show that the eddy remained almost stationary in the Iceland Basin since first being detected in late 1995 and that it almost certainly formed locally, probably as a result of an instability in the current flow around the northwest of the Hatton Bank. Comparisons between satellite SLAs and hydrographic estimates of sea-surface elevation confirm that the eddy had a substantial barotropic flow. Both the altimeter data and the sea-surface height derived from the acoustic Doppler current profiler agree that the PRIME eddy had a sea-surface elevation of about 20 cm and that its diameter was about 120 km.