CoAuthors

Dudley Chelton (Oregon State University, United States)

We present a progress report on the development of Eulerian statistics for efficient estimation of fluid trapping and transport by eddies identified and tracked from the global, gridded, multi-decadal, multi-altimeter SSH dataset. Existing methods for computing Lagrangian transport of fluid by mesoscale eddies primarily depend on explicit computation of Lagrangian trajectories or a large amount of related Lagrangian information, and are computationally intensive. We seek an efficient alternative method for estimating this transport that is based on Eulerian statistics and can be applied conveniently to large datasets such as the global, gridded, multi-decadal, multi-altimeter SSH products available from CLS/DUACS/AVISO. The method makes use of Eulerian estimates of the nonlinearity of SSH-tracked eddies. A progress report on this work is provided here. An anticipated future refinement is the incorporation of other Eulerian statistics that quantify the temporal variability or coherence of the tracked eddy structures, which can have a strong influence on fluid trapping and Lagrangian transport.