Partitioning Ocean Motions Into Balanced Motions and Internal Gravity Waves: A Modeling Study in Anticipation of Future Space Missions

By H. Torres, Patrice Klein, Dimitris Menemenlis, B. Qiu, Z. Su, Jinbo Wang, Shuiming Chen, Lee-Lueng Fu. Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans, 2018

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Q:* line 65: “the products are available on a daily scale with a 0.25_ _ 0.25_ resolution in the global ocean as DUACS DT14 [Pujol et al., 2016].” It is important to remind the readers that this 0.25 degree resolution is only the datanresolution, not the physical signal resolution. The real signal resolution of Aviso is mostly only 100-200 km. A: Thanks, we have added this notation accordingly. Q:* line 100: “In the present study, both H 0 and H 1 are chosen to be 200 m, partly according to some recent observations” is your result sensitive to your choice of 200m? Need some discussion here. A: We have added the discussion in a new section accordingly. Q:* line 20: “During their lifetime, complex dynamic processes occur, such as merging and splitting, which are associated with an eddy’s genesis and termination. ” While eddy merging and splitting are an important topic, please clarify that you mainly focus on coherent eddies in this study (e.g. those you can count and recognize) rather than general eddy field. Note that eddies include not only coherent vortexes (your focus) but also all the rotational but incoherent turbulent structures such as chaotic filaments and fronts. Most of eddy kinetic energy (EKE) in the ocean are not from coherent eddies but from incoherent ones; and eddy transport of tracers is mostly due to incoherent motions: e.g. see and cite the following papers: Partitioning Ocean Motions Into Balanced Motions and Internal Gravity Waves: A Modeling Study in Anticipation of Future Space Missions, Journal of Geophysical Research, 123, 8084– 8105 and this paper: Ocean submesoscales as a key component of the global heat budget. Nature Communications, 9, 775. Another example is your line 75 “Surface eddies are distinguished from subsurface eddies by whether their core is in the surface layer or located inside the water column (Fig. 1a)”. Incoherent eddies usually do not have a core and do not have the concept of eddy radii. This is not a trivial comment and you should treat seriously: your first paragraph seems to mix/confuse these two together. A: Thanks for the useful information, we have clarified this according to your suggestion. We also add “Besides, there are incoherent eddies, which usually do not have a core and do not have the concept of eddy radii. These incoherent eddies are also important, since most of eddy kinetic energy (EKE) in the ocean are from incoherent ones [Torres et al., 2018]; and eddy transport of tracers is mostly due to incoherent motions [Su et al., 2018]”. Q:* line 245: “we calculated the change of eddy gravitational PE” Most people will not understand this term. Define “eddy gravitational PE”, its meaning and difference from EPE and indicate how you calculate it. A: Suggestion followed, we have added the formula as Eq. (10).

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd7c22bf7b6c5a36a570f9d5f83a7988dc2e3a10