A 25 year collaboration using ADCPs

Cole, Rick; Symonds, Darryl

doi:10.1109/cwtm.2015.7098110

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…The experiment was designed with the intent of combining the complementary strengths of disparate platforms and techniques. Specifically, acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) are unable to reliably recover the current vector profile near to an undulating boundary, a result of side‐lobe contamination (Cole & Symonds, ). This blind spot is filled in here through a combination of drifting instruments and near‐field remote sensing that target near‐surface flows while missing the deeper currents described by the ADCP.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Observations of Near‐Surface Current Shear Help Describe Oceanic Oil and Plastic Transport

Laxague

Özgökmen

Haus

et al. 2018

Geophysical Research Letters

102

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Plastics and spilled oil pose a critical threat to marine life and human health. As a result of wind forcing and wave motions, theoretical and laboratory studies predict very strong velocity variation with depth over the upper few centimeters of the water column, an observational blind spot in the real ocean. Here we present the first‐ever ocean measurements of the current vector profile defined to within 1 cm of the free surface. In our illustrative example, the current magnitude averaged over the upper 1 cm of the ocean is shown to be nearly four times the average over the upper 10 m, even for mild forcing. Our findings indicate that this shear will rapidly separate pieces of marine debris which vary in size or buoyancy, making consideration of these dynamics essential to an improved understanding of the pathways along which marine plastics and oil are transported.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Observations of Near‐Surface Current Shear Help Describe Oceanic Oil and Plastic Transport

Laxague

Özgökmen

Haus

et al. 2018

Geophysical Research Letters

102

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Vertical structure of ocean surface currents under high winds from massive arrays of drifters

et al. 2019

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Abstract. Very-near-surface ocean currents are dominated by wind and wave forcing and have large impacts on the transport of buoyant materials in the ocean. Surface currents, however, are under-resolved in most operational ocean models due to the difficultly of measuring ocean currents close to, or directly at, the air–sea interface with many modern instrumentations. Here, observations of ocean currents at two depths within the first meter of the surface are made utilizing trajectory data from both drogued and undrogued Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment (CARTHE) drifters, which have draft depths of 60 and 5 cm, respectively. Trajectory data of dense, colocated drogued and undrogued drifters were collected during the Lagrangian Submesoscale Experiment (LASER) that took place from January to March of 2016 in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Examination of the drifter data reveals that the drifter velocities become strongly wind- and wave-driven during periods of high wind, with the pre-existing regional circulation having a smaller, but non-negligible, influence on the total drifter velocities. During these high wind events, we deconstruct the total drifter velocities of each drifter type into their wind- and wave-driven components after subtracting an estimate for the regional circulation, which pre-exists each wind event. In order to capture the regional circulation in the absence of strong wind and wave forcing, a Lagrangian variational method is used to create hourly velocity field estimates for both drifter types separately, during the hours preceding each high wind event. Synoptic wind and wave output data from the Unified Wave INterface-Coupled Model (UWIN-CM), a fully coupled atmosphere, wave and ocean circulation model, are used for analysis. The wind-driven component of the drifter velocities exhibits a rotation to the right with depth between the velocities measured by undrogued and drogued drifters. We find that the average wind-driven velocity of undrogued drifters (drogued drifters) is ∼3.4 %–6.0 % (∼2.3 %–4.1 %) of the wind speed and is deflected ∼5–55∘ (∼30–85∘) to the right of the wind, reaching higher deflection angles at higher wind speeds. Results provide new insight on the vertical shear present in wind-driven surface currents under high winds, which have vital implications for any surface transport problem.

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A 25 year collaboration using ADCPs

Cited by 2 publications

References 3 publications

Observations of Near‐Surface Current Shear Help Describe Oceanic Oil and Plastic Transport

Observations of Near‐Surface Current Shear Help Describe Oceanic Oil and Plastic Transport

Vertical structure of ocean surface currents under high winds from massive arrays of drifters

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