Transport By Oceanic Mesoscale Eddies*

Mass transport in the ocean plays a crucial role in regulating Earth’s climate and natural marine resources.

The ocean circulation spans a vast range of scales, from 1 mm to thousands of kilometers. Large-scale winds and thermohaline processes are widely recognized as major drivers of oceanic circulation on a large scale. However, it widely recognized that mesoscale eddies, which range in size from tens of kilometers to a few hundred kilometers, account for a dominant fraction of the ocean’s total kinetic energy and play an important role in transport. Previous studies analyzed such transport using eddy detection techniques. Here, we employ coarse-graining to analyze mass transport using both Eulerian and Lagrangian frameworks to investigate the mass transport induced by mesoscale eddies. We rely on satellite altimetry and reanalysis data, which allows us to study both the roles of both geostrophic and ageostrophic ocean currents in global transport.