Ocean Circulation
Ocean Circulation and Ocean Winds
Ocean surface currents and winds are essential climate variables that regulate the exchange of heat and gases between the ocean and atmosphere over a broad range of scales, spanning from hundreds of meters to thousands of kilometers.
However, systematic observations of winds and currents simultaneously at sufficiently high resolutions globally and regionally have remained elusive. This gap in our understanding is what we aim to address with our proposed ODYSEA (Ocean Dynamics and Surface Exchange with the Atmosphere) project, currently in development and the NASA-JPL DopplerScatt (Doppler scatterometry).
Airborne Doppler Scatterometry (DopplerScatt) to measure ocean winds and currents at kilometer-scale, simultaneously
Airborne measurements by the DopplerScatt radar of ocean surface currents at kilometer-scale
One of our Kilometer-scale Atmosphere (a) – Ocean (b) simulation used to carry out Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs)
Animation that illustrates how the Ocean Dynamics and Sea Exchanges with the Atmosphere (ODYSEA) satellite mission concept will generate the required data
Hector Torres
My research utilizes a combination of in-situ, satellite, and airborne observations at the air-sea interface, as well as numerical models ranging from idealized experiments to state-of-the-art global ocean-atmosphere simulations. These methods are blended with concepts of geophysical fluid dynamics to investigate ocean circulation across scales, from hundreds of kilometers down to kilometer scales. More recently, my focus has shifted to studying the interaction between the ocean and atmosphere, exploring how the ocean influences the atmosphere on scales smaller than hundreds of kilometers and across seasonal to sub-seasonal timescales.
Svetla Hristova-Veleva
Received a Ph. D. in atmospheric sciences from Texas A&M University in 1999, and has been a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since that time.
Her research includes the global-scale study of near-surface wind and its use in tracking changes in the atmospheric circulation, down to storm-scale analyses of storm morphology and dynamics and the processes that control the upscale growth and organization of convection.
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