Ocean fine-scale dynamics

Energetic ocean fronts, filaments, and submesoscale eddies are ubiquitous in the upper ocean. These features are typically only a few to tens of kilometers wide, but they can extend hundreds of kilometers in length and penetrate hundreds of meters deep, where they stir and overturn water masses, sharpen density gradients, and drive vigorous vertical motions. When they do so, they strongly modulate air–sea exchanges of heat, moisture, and carbon dioxide, imprinting the passage of storms on the upper ocean and shaping the structure and variability of the ocean mixed layer.

Fine-scale fronts and filaments are numerous, collectively influencing how efficiently the ocean takes up anthropogenic heat and CO2, and how that uptake is distributed in space and depth. Biases in the representation of these small-scale processes in climate models can therefore lead to errors in simulated stratification, mixed-layer depth, and air–sea fluxes, with knock-on effects for large-scale ocean circulation and climate projections. To better understand and constrain these dynamics, I combine multi-platform observations from autonomous ocean robotics, research vessels, and satellites with high-resolution coupled models and boundary-layer frameworks.