Rafa Santana’s paper on submesoscale eddy transport in the East Auckland Current is now out in JGR: Oceans! Eddies of this intermediate scale are found in many boundary current regions. In this work, Rafa was interested in how this scale of eddy traps coastal fluid and exchanges it with the shelfbreak and offshore regions. He also used numerical experiments with and without data-assimilation to show comparable statistics in these small eddies. Although it is common practice to assimilate mesoscale fields, submesoscale activity grows intrinsically in our equations of motion. It is somewhat comforting to know that the “nudging” by large scale data assimilation does not affect the statistics of these features.
Seasick Suanda 