An international team of scientists has found the first direct evidence linking seemingly random weather systems in the ocean with climate on a global scale.
An international team of scientists has found the first direct evidence linking seemingly random weather systems in the ocean with climate on a global scale. Led by Hussein Aluie, an associate professor in the University of Rochester’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and staff scientist at the University’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, the team reported their findings in Science Advances.
The ocean has weather patterns like what we experience on land, but on different time and length scales, says lead author Benjamin Storer, a research associate in Aluie’s Turbulence and Complex Flow Group. A weather pattern on land might last a few days and be about 500 kilometers wide, while oceanic weather patterns such as swirling eddies last three to four weeks but are about one-fifth the size.
“Scientists have long speculated that these ubiquitous and seemingly random motions in the ocean communicate with climate scales, but it has always been vague because it wasn’t clear how to disentangle this complex system to measure their interactions,” says Aluie. “We developed a framework that can do exactly that. What we found was not what people were expecting because it requires the mediation of the atmosphere.”
Read more at: University of Rochester
This illustration by Benjamin Storer shows oceanic weather systems (mesoscale eddies) from data overlaid with atmospherically driven climate-scale currents (black lines), which can be extracted with a coarse graining technique developed in the lab of Hussein Aluie. The image reveals how these ocean weather systems are energized (red) or weakened (blue) when interacting with climate-scales, which follows a pattern mirroring the global atmospheric circulation. (Photo Credit: University of Rochester / Benjamin Storer)
