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The diurnal cycling of submesoscale circulations in vorticity, divergence, and strain is investigated using drifter data collected as part of the Lagrangian Submesoscale Experiment (LASER) experiment, which took place in the northern Gulf of Mexico during winter 2016, and ROMS simulations at different resolutions and degree of realism. The first observational evidence of a submesoscale diurnal cycle is presented. The cycling is detected in the LASER data during periods of weak winds, whereas the signal is obscured during strong wind events. Results from ROMS in the most realistic setup and in sensitivity runs with idealized wind patterns demonstrate that wind bursts disrupt the submesoscale diurnal cycle, independently of the time of day at which they happen. The observed and simulated submesoscale diurnal cycle supports the existence of a shift of approximately 1–3 h between the occurrence of divergence and vorticity maxima, broadly in agreement with theoretical predictions. The amplitude of the modeled signal, on the other hand, always underestimates the observed one, suggesting that even a horizontal resolution of 500 m is insufficient to capture the strength of the observed variability in submesoscale circulations. The paper also presents an evaluation of how well the diurnal cycle can be detected as function of the number of Lagrangian particles. If more than 2000 particle triplets are considered, the diurnal cycle is well captured, but for a number of triplets comparable to that of the LASER analysis, the reconstructed diurnal cycling displays high levels of noise both in the model and in the observations.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
On the Horizontal Divergence Asymmetry in the Gulf of Mexico
Due to the geostrophic balance, horizontal divergence-free is often assumed when analyzing large-scale oceanic flows. However, the geostrophic balance is a leading-order approximation. We investigate the statistical feature of weak horizontal compressibility in the Gulf of Mexico by analyzing drifter data (the Grand LAgrangian Deployment (GLAD) experiment and the LAgrangian Submesoscale ExpeRiment (LASER)) based on the asymptotic probability density function of the angle between velocity and acceleration difference vectors in a strain-dominant model. The results reveal a notable divergence at scales between 10 km and 300 km, which is stronger in winter (LASER) than in summer (GLAD). We conjecture that the divergence is induced by wind stress with its curl parallel to the Earth’s rotation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2242110
- PAR ID:
- 10595803
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Symmetry
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2073-8994
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 136
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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