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Ocean Eddies: Hot spots for air-sea intercations and water masses (trans)formations
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  • Sabrina Speich,
  • Rémi Laxenaire,
  • Tonia Astrid Capuano,
  • Bruno Blanke,
  • Xavier Carton
Sabrina Speich

Corresponding Author:speich@lmd.ens.fr

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Rémi Laxenaire
Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique
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Tonia Astrid Capuano
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Bruno Blanke
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Xavier Carton
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Abstract

Mesoscale eddies are ubiquitous in the ocean, and typically exhibit different characteristics to their surroundings, allowing them to transport properties such as heat, salt and carbon around the ocean. This takes place everywhere in the world’s ocean and at all latitude bands. Most of mesoscale eddies energy is generated by instabilities of the mean flow, and by air-sea interactions. Mesoscale dynamics can feed energy and momentum back into the mean flow and help drive the deep ocean circulation. Their suspected importance in transporting and mixing water properties as they propagate in the ocean, play a significant role in the global budgets of these tracers and climate. Increasing evidences point out at intense air-sea interaction at smaller scale than synoptical, especially in the extratropics that can strongly affect the Troposphere. However we do not have yet neither a global quantitative assessments nor a theoretical understanding of these processes. We will present new results from a recently developed eddy-atlas (ToEddies) that includes eddies merging and splitting. In particular, we will discuss properties of Agulhas Rings in the South Atlantic derived from satellite altimetry and the colocalization of these eddies with Argo floats. Our results show that these eddies are, in the South Atlantic, associated with strong thermal and haline anomalies. These are essentially due to Mode Waters (Agulhas Rings Mode Water: ARMW) formed in the core of the rings in the southeastern Cape Basin, just west of the Agulhas Retroflection, after intense air-sea interactions that can last for more than an entire season. These eddies are then advected in the South Atlantic and are responsible of an important flux of heat and salt into this basin (Laxenaire et al. 2018a,b). We corroborate such findings with full depth hydrography of selected eddies and very high-resolution modelling studies.