VHF radar detects oceanic submesoscale vortex along Florida Coast

Abstract

Escalating national interest in the coastal ocean underscores the need for high‐quality surface current data that can improve our understanding of surface circulation and its impact on societal and environmental issues related to coastal pollution, beach restoration, oil spill mitigation, and coastal air‐sea interaction. Coastal regimes exposed to strong ocean currents,surface waves, and winds during storm conditions may frequently require beach renourishment to restore valuable beaches that are key to local economies. Maintaining water quality is a problem, too, particularly where shipping dominates the traffic in and out of harbors. These environmental issues are increasingly difficult to manage due to evolving oceanic and atmospheric conditions. Inferring evolving spatial patterns of the coastal ocean current fields from single‐point measurements such as moorings or drifters that propagate away from divergent flow regimes is difficult at best. The Doppler radar technique is one approach that effectively measures the evolution of surface current fields in near‐real time.

HF Radar Activity in European Coastal Seas: Next Steps toward a Pan-European HF Radar Network

“…Similar spatial scales where studied by Sentchev et al (2013) after improving resolution of a 12.14 MHz radar using alternative processing methods. Other authors have utilized very HFRs with a high horizontal resolution of (250-400 m) to study O(2-3) km vortices over the shelf in different areas (e.g., Shay et al, 2000;Kim, 2010;Kirincich, 2016).…”

Pollution release tied to invariant manifolds: A case study for the coast of Florida

“…Recent surface current observations from ocean surface current radar (OSCR) using the very high frequency (VHF) mode reveal complex surface current patterns near the coast of Florida [5,6].…”

“…In our analysis, we use a combination of accurate surface current measurement [5,6] and recent developments in nonlinear dynamical systems theory [7]. In contrast to earlier approaches to pollution control in simple flow models [8][9][10][11][12], we rely on real-time velocity data collected by coastal Doppler radar systems.…”

Lagrangian Structures in Very High-Frequency Radar Data and Optimal Pollution Timing

“…Depending on their release position and release time, identical parcels of contaminants can have completely different effects on the environment. Using a combination of accurate current measurement [4] and recent developments in nonlinear dynamical systems theory [5,6], we uncover previously unknown flow structures 1 that govern the mesoscale transport of pollutants. Knowledge of these Lagrangian structures should lead to predictions [7] on a number of phenomena, ranging from the motion of plankton populations to the evolution of oil spills.…”

“…To determine the velocity, the left-hand side of Equation (1), we examine very high-frequency (VHF) radar measurement of near-surface currents along the coast of Florida [4]. Except for measurement errors, the VHF data shown on Fig.…”