Denisse Sciamarella (CNRS, France); Martin Saraceno (CIMA, Argentina); Christophe Guinet (CEBC, France); Nicolás Bodnariuk (CIMA, Argentina); Gisela Charó (CIMA, Argentina)

The topological approach called "templex" (Charó et al., 2022) introduces the use of a cell complex endowed with a directed graph to characterize the structure of a flow in phase space. Templex properties are shared by fluid particles exhibiting a certain qualitative behavior, and therefore can be used to detect Lagrangian patterns. When applied to single particles, the approach requires long time windows to reconstruct the flow in phase space. In order to compensate for the low-term stability of ocean particle behavior, we develop a strategy that uses a bundle of several particles in the neighborhood of a point. The topological classes found with this strategy applied to surface geostrophic velocities maps derived from satellite altimetry enable identifying eddies and other patterns, which have been studied in connexion with elephant seal behavior. Our study shows that templex-detected patterns along the trajectory of an elephant seal in the South Atlantic region bear a relation with prey catch attempt events and with the Quasi-Planktonic Index (Allice Della Penna et al., 2015).