Do eddies ride on Rossby waves?

Both vortices and baroclinic Rossby waves show up as westward-propagating features in the sea surface height anomaly (SSHA) records when displayed in the form of zonal-temporal or Hovmoller diagrams. A chain of filters was used to separate the SSHA into orthogonal components. Each of the filtered components was then reassembled as a set of maps. In the maps of individual components, we clearly see westward propagating Rossby waves. Our most striking findings are: (i) limited within their critical latitudes, the wave extrema coincide with a significant number of vortices; (ii) eddy-wave coincidence occurs at a preferred latitude that depends on the wave period; (iii) among the vortices that, at some point of their existence coincide with a wave, a relatively large percentage of them remained their whole lifetime with the wave, and (iv) a mechanism is proposed to explain why eddies tend to remain over the wave extrema (crests and troughs). Our answer to the title question is: yes, they often do.