Demography Of Mesoscale Eddies (DOME)

About This Grant

Ocean mesoscale eddies are ubiquitous features of the global ocean that strongly influence the ocean’s physics, chemistry, and biology; they influence other components of the Earth system via air-sea and sea-ice interactions and are crucial drivers of marine heat waves. The project applies modern spatial-statistical methods to an extensive data set of satellite observations of sea surface height. This will result in advancement of our understanding of the physical oceanography of those eddies, and of their representation in global ocean models, and of their changes over time. This project will introduce new and comprehensive statistical analyses of eddy trajectories and characteristics. The project will use high-resolution Earth system simulations to assess and understand internal variability in the eddy population, as well as to predict decadal to centennial changes in the population. Standard practice for comparing the population of eddies in models and in observations uses simple statistics like eddy kinetic energy and SSH variability. The use of such basic statistics can mask important differences between the modeled and observed eddy populations. This project will use the newly developed extensions of the statistical description of eddy populations to precisely quantify the differences between observed and modeled eddy populations. The project will then, on the basis of this precise comparison, work to assess the fidelity of different models and to improve the representation of eddies in the models. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.