Separating Vortical and Wavy Motions Using the Concurrent Numerical Simulation and SWOT Measurement
Baizhi Wang (wangbzh7@mail2.sysu.edu.cn), Chuanyin Wang (wangchuanyin@sml-zhuhai.cn)
Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), China
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite provides an unprecedented opportunity to study sea surface height of vortical and wavy motions. However, the separation of those two processes is difficult due to the limited temporal sampling of SWOT. Here, we explore a data-driven separation approach. Basically, we use the dynamic mode decomposition to extract spatial modes, which respectively correspond to vortical and wavy motions, from the numerical simulation concurrent with the SWOT measurement. Onto those modes, the SWOT measurement is then projected, finally leading to a decomposition of sea surface height into vortical and wavy components. This approach is applied in the Gulf of Mexico and a satisfactory separation is achieved.