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Abstract The Gulf Stream, a major ocean current in the North Atlantic ocean is a key component in the global redistribution of heat and is important for marine ecosystems. Based on 27 years (1993–2019) of wind reanalysis and satellite altimetry measurements, we present observational evidence that the path of this freely meandering jet after its separation from the continental slope at Cape Hatteras, aligns with the region of maximum cyclonic vorticity of the wind stress field known as the positive vorticity pool. This synchronicity between the wind stress curl maximum region and the Gulf Stream path is observed at multiple time-scales ranging from months to decades, spanning a distance of 1500 km between 70 and 55W. The wind stress curl in the positive vorticity pool is estimated to drive persistent upward vertical velocities ranging from 5 to 17 cm day⁻¹over its ~ 400,000 km²area; this upwelling may supply a steady source of deep nutrients to the Slope Sea region, and can explain as much as a quarter of estimated primary productivity there. 

Testing whether the mean vector from some population is zero or not is a fundamental problem in statistics. In the high-dimensional regime, where the dimension of data p is greater than the sample size n, traditional methods such as Hotelling’s T2 test cannot be directly applied. One can project the high-dimensional vector onto a space of low dimension and then traditional methods can be applied. In this paper, we propose a projection test based on a new estimation of the optimal projection direction Σ^{−1}μ. Under the assumption that the optimal projection Σ^{−1}μ is sparse, we use a regularized quadratic programming with nonconvex penalty and linear constraint to estimate it. Simulation studies and real data analysis are conducted to examine the finite sample performance of different tests in terms of type I error and power.