Summary
The Group of Monitoring the Ocean with Gliders (GMOG) has been monitoring the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) quasi-continuously between 2016 and 2019; gathering thousands of vertical profiles of essential oceanic variables at a horizontal resolution never attained before of 2-5km. In this talk, relevant glider and Argos observations are shown that shed some light on a variety of mesoscale and submesoscale processes that occur in the GoM: (i) the transformation of North Atlantic Subtropical Underwaters (NASUW) to Gulf Common Waters (GCW) inside mesoscale anticyclonic eddies during winter, (ii) enhancements of chlorophyll-a concentration during Northern wind events, (iii) the lateral diffusion of the anticyclonic eddies’ heat and salt content, (iv) fine-vertical-scale intrusions of temperature and salinity at the periphery of anticyclonic eddies, and (v) submesoscale structures of about 30km scale such as anticyclonic/cyclonic intra-thermocline eddies.
Brief biography
Enric Pallàs-Sanz (Mexican PI), PhD, 44 years, research scientist at Centro de Investigación Científica y Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE), has been working the last 12 years on topics related to mesoscale vertical velocity of balanced vortical flows (eddies and fronts), unbalanced flows (near-inertia gravity waves), and wave-mean flow interactions. He has made significant contributions on developing and implementing a generalized version of the omega equation to diagnose mesoscale vertical velocity from density and horizontal velocity data. Since 2016 he is leading the Group of Monitoring the Ocean with Gliders (GMOG) who´s mission is to monitoring, at high-resolution, the vertical, thermohaline and kinematic, structure of the Loop Current Eddies (LCEs) in the Gulf of Mexico (https://gliders.cicese.mx). His recent publications have provided new insights on frontal and vortex dynamics using different platforms of observation, namely, Seasoar, mooring, and glider data. Using mooring data from the Donnut Hole area in the Loop Current System, he has recently published two papers regarding the near-inertial response of the ocean to the passage of hurricanes over the Loop Current. He is co-author of 10 publications (2018-2021) on the structure and dynamics of mesoscale eddies from basin scale (heat and salt content) to small scale (layering), the water mass distribution and transformation within the eddies; and the deep circulation in the Gulf of Mexico using observations (gliders and moorings) and numerical modeling. Member of Mexico’s ‘Sistema Nacional de Investigadores’ (SNI) with level I. Professor at the Postgraduate school at CICESE teaching Data Analysis in Oceanography and associate professor in the Centro de Investigación en Ciencia Aplicada y Tecnología Avanzada of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional.