Journal
FRONTIERS OF EARTH SCIENCE
Volume 9, Issue 2, Pages 202-208Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s11707-014-0478-z
Keywords
sea level anomaly; ocean eddies; Taylor vortex; typical shape
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Funding
- National Basic Research Program of China [2012CB417402, 2013CB430303]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [41376017, 41205126]
- Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Composition and Optical Radiation of Chinese Academy of Sciences [JJ1102]
- State Key Laboratory of Satellite Ocean Environment Dynamics [SOED1501]
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In this research, we normalized the characteristics of ocean eddies by using satellite observation of the Sea Level Anomaly (SLA) data to determine the most typical shape of ocean eddies. This normalization is based on modified analytic functions with nonlinear optimal fitting. The most typical eddy is the Taylor vortex (similar to 50%), which exhibits a Gaussian-shaped exp(-r (2)) SLA and a vorticity distribution of (1 - r (2))exp(-r (2)) as a function of the normalized radii r. The larger the amplitude of the eddy, the more likely the eddy is to be Gaussian-shaped. Furthermore, approximately 40% of ocean eddies are combinations of two Gaussian eddies with different parameters, but the composition of these types of eddies is more like a quadratic eddy than a Gaussian one. Only a small portion of oceanic eddies are pure quadratic eddies (< 10%) with the same vorticity distribution as a Rankine vortex. We concluded that the Taylor vortex is a good approximation of the typical shape of ocean eddies.
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