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Abstract The vertical structure of ocean eddies is generally surface-intensified, commonly attributed to the dominant baroclinic modes arising from the boundary conditions (BCs). Conventional BC considerations mostly focus on either flat- or rough-bottom conditions. The impact of surface buoyancy anomalies—often represented by surface potential vorticity (PV) anomalies—has not been fully explored. Here, we study the role of the surface PV in setting the vertical distribution of eddy kinetic energy (EKE) in an idealized adiabatic ocean model driven by wind stress. The simulated EKE profile in the extratropical ocean tends to peak at the surface and have ane-folding depth typically smaller than half of the ocean depth. This vertical structure can be reasonably represented by a single surface quasigeostrophic (SQG) mode at the energy-containing scale resulting from the large-scale PV structure. Due to isopycnal outcropping and interior PV homogenization, the surface meridional PV gradient is substantially stronger than the interior PV gradient, yielding surface-trapped baroclinically unstable modes with horizontal scales comparable to or smaller than the deformation radius. These surface-trapped eddies then grow in size both horizontally and vertically through an inverse energy cascade up to the energy-containing scale, which dominates the vertical distribution of EKE. As for smaller horizontal scales, the EKE distribution decays faster with depth. Guided by this interpretation, an SQG-based scale-aware parameterization of the EKE profile is proposed. Preliminary offline diagnosis of a high-resolution simulation shows the proposed scheme successfully reproducing the dependence of the vertical structure of EKE on the horizontal grid resolution.