North Atlantic surface circulation during the 1990's observed with satellite‐tracked drifters

Decadal- to interannual-scale source water variations in the Caribbean Sea recorded by Puerto Rican coral radiocarbon

“…The high level of agreement between these two datasets demonstrates that coral radiocarbon records from these areas accurately reflect the Δ 14 C of the surrounding seawater. Some major currents are labeled (CC -Caribbean Current, NBC -North Brazil Current, NEC -North Equatorial Current, NECC -North Equatorial Counter Current, SEC -South Equatorial Current) and schematically represented by the purple lines and arrows, after the drifter study of (Fratantoni 2001). Other sample sites mentioned in the text are marked with Xs and labeled.…”

On the surface circulation in the western Coral Sea and residence times in the Great Barrier Reef

“…A grid consisting of 50 km radius circles, repeated every 50 km, was chosen to provide a reasonable summary of the major surface cir-culation features of the WCS, and the Western Boundary Currents. This choice was guided by studies by Fratantoni [2001] in the Atlantic Ocean and by Poulain [2001] in the Adriatic Sea. The choice of the grid cell size takes into account the maximum velocity observed in the domain, the density of observations and the number of independent observations.…”

Measuring surface currents with Surface Velocity Program drifters: the instrument, its data, and some recent results

“…Altimetry is excellent at capturing the variations of sea level height associated with geostrophic velocity anomalies, but cannot yet map absolute sea level with sufficient accuracy to resolve time-mean currents. Furthermore, sea level anomaly fails to account for significant ageostrophic components of velocity variation, such as centrifugal effects that may account for differences in drifter-derived and altimeter-derived eddy kinetic energy (EKE) on either side of the Gulf Stream front (Fratantoni, 2001). In addition, altimetry, and hydrography to produce an alternative global mean dynamic topography (Rio and Hernandez, 2004).…”

“…Many investigators interested in subinertial motion (e.g., Ralph and Niiler, 1999;Fratantoni, 2001;Lumpkin and Garzoli, 2005) apply a lowpass filter to these velocities before proceeding with their analyses.…”