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Spatiotemporal evolution of submesoscale filaments at the periphery of an anticyclonic mesoscale eddy north of the Kuroshio Extension

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Abstract

Five high-resolution hydrographic sections were conducted at the periphery of an anticyclonic mesoscale eddy north of the Kuroshio Extension (KE) to explore the evolution of submesoscale structure in the subsurface layer associated with mesoscale eddies. The five sections continuously captured patches of low temperature and salinity water originated from the subarctic region with a horizontal scale of 10–20 km and a vertical scale of 100 m in the strain field at the periphery and in the interior of the eddy detected mainly by the surface Okubo-Weiss parameter. Each patch on the same isopycnal constituted a submesoscale filament. A cold and fresh filament in the intermediate layer in and around the eddy was recently ventilated compared with ambient water, suggesting that submesoscale filaments contribute to a rapid water mass transport from the outside to the inside of the eddy, as well as from the subarctic to the KE region. Filaments at the periphery of the eddy were forced by the convergence in the cross-frontal direction. The horizontal tracer gradient of the filaments evolved in the downstream direction, and 10–50% of the evolution was explained by geostrophic forcing. Moreover, the analysis implied that the evolution of the vertical tracer gradient might have been caused by the vertical shear of the horizontal velocity. The resulting patches were expected to contribute to an effective mixing, suggesting the influence of submesoscale filaments on not only the water mass transport but also the transformation in and around mesoscale eddies in the KE region.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the captain, crew and scientists participating in the KH-16-3 cruise of the R/V Hakuho-Maru of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology for their successful surveys. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This study is supported by the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (KAKENHI, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) no. 25287118 and Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research no. 26610148) and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas no. 22106007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fisheries Resources Institute, Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency, Fukuura 2-12-4, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa, 236-8648, Japan

    Daiki Ito

  2. Department of Geophysics, Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

    Toshio Suga

  3. Research Institute for Global Change (RIGC), Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Yokosuka, Japan

    Toshio Suga, Shinya Kouketsu & Yoshimi Kawai

  4. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan

    Eitarou Oka

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  1. Daiki Ito
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  2. Toshio Suga
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  3. Shinya Kouketsu
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  4. Eitarou Oka
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  5. Yoshimi Kawai
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Correspondence to Daiki Ito.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Calculation of horizontal shear

The x-axis and y-axis were defined as positive eastward and positive northward, respectively, and geostrophic velocities and x- and y-derivatives of π, U, and V were calculated. We defined the westernmost line (line 5) as i = 1 and the southernmost station in each line as j = 1. For a variable A, the x-derivative was calculated as:

$$\frac{{\partial A_{i, j} }}{\partial x} = \frac{{A_{i, j} - A_{i - 1, j - 1} }}{{x_{i, j} - x_{i - 1, j - 1} }}{\text{with}} i = 2, 5, j = 2, 16,$$
(6)

after raw data were horizontally smoothed using a three-point Hanning filter. As shown in Eq. 6, the x-derivatives were calculated in line 1, 2, 3, and 4. The difference was divided by their distance apart (~ 15 km). The y-derivative was calculated as:

$$\frac{{\partial A_{i, j} }}{\partial y} = \frac{{A_{i, j + 1} - A_{i, j - 1} }}{{y_{i, j + 1} - y_{i, j - 1} }}{\text{with}} i = 1, 5, j = 2, 15.$$
(7)

The difference was divided by their distance apart (~ 11 km).

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Ito, D., Suga, T., Kouketsu, S. et al. Spatiotemporal evolution of submesoscale filaments at the periphery of an anticyclonic mesoscale eddy north of the Kuroshio Extension. J Oceanogr 77, 763–780 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10872-021-00607-4

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