Abstract
Eddies in the global and coastal ocean play a key role in mixing and transport processes. Here, we present an eddy census for the Baltic Sea covering the years 2008–2010. The eddy tracking was carried out with three different eddy detection methods (an Eulerian streamline based and two Lagrangian coherent structure-based methods). The near surface velocity fields were generated with GETM (General Estuarine Transport Model), an eddy-resolving ocean model (internal Rossby radius ≈ 5 km, grid resolution ≈ 0.6 km). The general shape of the statistics for the three detection algorithms agree well for lifetime and propagation distance. The most striking differences between the methods were visible for the eddy size, with much smaller eddy-radii detected by the Lagrangian methods. Although we only find minor variations in the monthly numbers of tracked eddies in total, we found large variations in the eddy core vorticity, with higher rotation and smaller radii during winter. This was caused by the changing stratification over the course of the year. Additionally, we found spatial changes in the ratio of cyclonic to anticyclonic rotating eddies and seasonal differences in the spatial distribution of eddies.
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Notes
An other implementation of LAVD as in Tarshish et al. (2018) with a fixed distance of contour levels would give a different result as the matlab package for LAVD-based eddy detection (https://github.com/LCSETH/Lagrangian-Averaged-Vorticity-Deviation-LAVD) used here.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is a contribution to the project T2 (energy budget of the ocean surface mixed layer) of the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 181 on Energy Transfer in Atmosphere and Ocean funded by the German Research Foundation.
We are grateful to the “Norddeutsche Verbund für Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnen (HLRN)” for the access to their high-performance computing center; the analyzed model data was computed on the HLRN. Most parts of the eddy tracking were performed at the HPC Cluster CARL, located at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) and funded by the DFG through its Major Research Instrumentation Programme (INST 184/157-1 FUGG) and the Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK) of the Lower Saxony State.
Model data and related material are available for scientific purpose upon request to the corresponding author (Rahel Vortmeyer-Kley, rahel.vortmeyer@io-warnemuende.de).
We would like to thank F. Nencioli for developing and providing the ETTB (Eddytracking package V2.1). We would like to thank G. Haller, A. Hadjighasem, and Co-workers for developing and providing the matlab package for LAVD based eddy detection (https://github.com/LCSETH/Lagrangian-Averaged-Vorticity-Deviation-LAVD).
Rahel Vortmeyer-Kley would like to thank Studienstiftung des dt. Volkes for a doctoral fellowship and BMBF-HyMeSimm FKZ 03F0747C for funding. Peter Holtermann would like to thank DFG Projekt UM79/5-1 for funding.
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Vortmeyer-Kley, R., Holtermann, P., Feudel, U. et al. Comparing Eulerian and Lagrangian eddy census for a tide-less, semi-enclosed basin, the Baltic Sea. Ocean Dynamics 69, 701–717 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-019-01269-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-019-01269-z