Coupling Oceanic Observation Systems to Study Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics
This addresses the challenge of modeling mesoscale ocean dynamics for climate science, but it is incremental as it builds on existing observation-driven frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of combining satellite and in-situ ocean observations to create high-resolution 3D temperature time series, proposing a latent-class regression method that improves vertical temperature prediction.
Understanding local currents in the North Atlantic region of the ocean is a key part of modelling heat transfer and global climate patterns. Satellites provide a surface signature of the temperature of the ocean with a high horizontal resolution while in situ autonomous probes supply high vertical resolution, but horizontally sparse, knowledge of the ocean interior thermal structure. The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology to combine these complementary ocean observing systems measurements to obtain a three-dimensional time series of ocean temperatures with high horizontal and vertical resolution. Within an observation-driven framework, we investigate the extent to which mesoscale ocean dynamics in the North Atlantic region may be decomposed into a mixture of dynamical modes, characterized by different local regressions between Sea Surface Temperature (SST), Sea Level Anomalies (SLA) and Vertical Temperature fields. Ultimately we propose a Latent-class regression method to improve prediction of vertical ocean temperature.