| Summary: | Mediterranean Water eddies are deep, subsurface anticyclones of highly saline and warm Mediterranean Water traveling throughout the Northeast Atlantic Ocean at depths of around 1000-meters. More commonly known by the term “meddies”, these phenomena are formed as a result of instability of the Mediterranean Undercurrent, leaving the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar, and can travel through the North Atlantic as coherent vortices for a number of years before dissipating or being destroyed. Meddies are believed to be a main contributor to the formation of the Mediterranean Water mass in the Atlantic, and have been studied at least since the early 1980s. The deep meddy cores are known to produce measurable physical expressions at the sea surface, observable by satellite altimetry directly above the cores’ locations, and allowing for their study using remote sensing data. While many past studies have focused on properties of meddy cores, only a handful of studies focus on the physical characteristics and behavior of their surface expressions. This thesis presents results coming from a systematic methodology based on in-situ and remote sensing data that allows for the detection and measurement of meddy surface expressions in satellite altimetry data. After gathering data on the surface expressions’ physical properties by satellite, they are compared to meddy core physical properties measured in situ. A physical-dynamical relationship is sought tying the physics of the meddy cores with that of their surface expressions. Results show that there is a physical relationship between the meddy core and its surface expression based on the physical properties of each. However, this relationship is not based on any single one of the physical properties measured, none of which are found to directly link the physics of the surface and depth. Rather, on a combination of physical-dynamical properties, based on previous theoretical work, is found to have particular weight in linking the two. Most significantly, the ...
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