Final results from McCoy et al., 'Global Observations of Submesoscale Coherent Vortices in the Ocean', submitted to Progress in Oceanography.

Submesoscale coherent vortices (SCVs) are small-scale, subsurface eddies that are ubiquitous in the ocean. Observations suggest that they efficiently trap and transport water, nutrients, and other properties thousands of kilometers away from their formation regions. However, the weak sea-surface signature restricts SCV observations to mostly chance encounters with shipboard subsurface instrumentation. Thus, the global occurrence, properties, and generation frequency of SCVs remain poorly constrained. Here we present results from a new algorithm used to identify SCVs from Argo float data, applied to roughly 2 million profiles conducted globally from August 1997 to January 2020.

After application of the SCV detection algorithm to the global Argo array, we identify 2501 casts piercing spicy-core SCVs (those with anomalously hot and salty water mass characteristics), and 1583 casts piercing minty-core SCVs (anomalously cold and fresh cores) over more than 20 years of available data. The Matlab file 'final_individual_scvs.mat' contains various data for each SCV identified.

By grouping detections from consecutive Argo casts, we are also able to record 383 spicy-core SCV time-series and 169 minty-core SCV time-series. The Matlab file 'final_timeseries_scvs.mat' contains the data for these time-series. 

For a more detailed description of each Matlab file, please see 'README.rtf'. 

Reach out to Daniel McCoy ([e-mail]) or Daniele Bianchi ([e-mail]) for inquiries.