Spatial scales of mesoscale eddies from GOCI Chlorophyll-a concentration images in the East/Japan Sea

Abstract

The spatial scales of mesoscale eddies are of importance to understand physio-biogeochemical processes in the East/Japan Sea. Chlorophyll-a concentration images from the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) revealed numerous eddies during the phytoplankton bloom in spring. These eddies were manually digitized to obtain geolocation information at the peripheries from GOCI images and then least-square fitted to each ellipse. The elliptic elements were the geolocation position of the eddy center, the rotation angle from due east, the eccentricity, the lengths of the semi-major and semi-minor axes, and the mean radius of the ellipse. The spatial scales of eddies had a mean radii ranging from 10 km to 75 km and tended to be smaller in the northern region. The scales revealed a linear trend of about -7.26 km/°N as a function of the latitude. This tendency depended on the latitudinal variation of the internal Rossby radius of deformation, which originates from the substantial difference in the density structure of the water column. The scales from the sea surface temperature image were larger by 1.30 times compared to those from ocean color image. This implies that physical processes along the periphery of the eddy affect the nutrient dynamics. © 2012 Korea Ocean Research & Development Institute (KORDI) and the Korean Society of Oceanography (KSO) and Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.