Coherent Lagrangian swirls among submesoscale motions

The emergence of coherent Lagrangian swirls (CLSs) among submesoscale motions in the ocean is illustrated. This is done by applying recent nonlinear dynamics tools for Lagrangian coherence detection on a surface flow realization produced by a data-assimilative submesoscale-permitting ocean general circulation model simulation of the Gulf of Mexico. Both mesoscale and submesoscale CLSs are extracted. These extractions prove the relevance of coherent Lagrangian eddies detected in satellite-altimetry-based geostrophic flow data for the arguably more realistic ageostrophic multiscale flow

Ocean Surface Connectivity in the Arctic: Capabilities and Caveats of Community Detection in Lagrangian Flow Networks

To identify barriers to transport in a fluid domain, community detection algorithms from network science have been used to divide the domain into clusters that are sparsely connected with each other. In a previous application to the closed domain of the Mediterranean Sea, communities detected by the Infomap algorithm have barriers that often coincide with well‐known oceanographic features. We apply this clustering method to the surface of the Arctic and subarctic oceans and thereby show that it can also be applied to open domains. First, we construct a Lagrangian flow network by simulating the exchange of Lagrangian particles between different bins in an icosahedral‐hexagonal grid. Then, Infomap is applied to identify groups of well‐connected bins. The resolved transport barriers include naturally occurring structures, such as the major currents. As expected, clusters in the Arctic are affected by seasonal and annual variations in sea‐ice concentration. An important caveat of community detection algorithms is that many different divisions into clusters may qualify as good solutions. Moreover, while certain cluster boundaries lie consistently at the same location between different good solutions, other boundary locations vary significantly, making it difficult to assess the physical meaning of a single solution. We therefore consider an ensemble of solutions to find persistent boundaries, trends, and correlations with surface velocities and sea‐ice cover

Large-scale volumetric flow measurement in a pure thermal plume by dense tracking of helium-filled soap bubbles

We present a spatially and temporally highly resolved flow measurement covering a !arge volume (~o.6 m3) in a pure thermal plume in air. The thermal plume develops above an extended heat source and is characterized by moderate velocities (U~0.35 m/s) with a Reynolds number of Re~500 and a Rayleigh number of Ra~100000. We demonstrate the requirements and capa bilities of the measurement equipment and the particle tracking approach to be able to probe measurement volumes up to and beyond one cubic meter. The use of !arge tracer particles (300 µm), helium-filled soap bubbles (HFSBs), is crucial and yields high particle image quality over large-volume depths when illuminated with arrays of pulsed high-power LEDs. The experimental limitations of the HFSBs-their limited lifetime and their intensity loss over time-are quantified. The HFSBs' uniform particle images allows an accurate reconstruction of the flow using Shake-The-Box particle tracking with high partlcle concentrations up to 0.1 particles per pixel. This enables tracking of up to 275,000 HFSBs simultaneously. After interpolating the scattered data onto a regular grid with a Navier-Stokes regularization, the velocity field of the thermal plume reveals a multitude of vortices with a smooth temporal evolution and a remarkable coherence in time (see animation, supplementary data). Acceleration fields are also derived from interpolated particle tracks and complement the flow measurement. Additionally, the flow map, the basis of a !arge dass of Lagrangian coherent structures, is computed directly from observed particle tracks. We show entrainment regions and coherent vortices of the thermal plume in the flow map and compute fields of the finite-time Lyapunov exponent