As flow goes past topography, wake eddies are often generated, which remove energy and momentum from the incident flow. The west-/eastward flow in the North Equatorial Current (NEC)/North Equatorial Countercurrent (NECC) encountering steep topography in the western Pacific has been a focus of recent work (Figure 1; Johnston, Schönau, et al. [2019], and references therein). At sloping topography, the friction at the bottom boundary generates vertical shear, which because of the slope produces a lateral shear (i.e., vertical vorticity;MacKinnon et al., 2019;McWilliams, 2016). As the flow separates, instabilities lead to eddy formation (McWilliams, 2016;White & Helfrich, 2013). One measure of an eddy's strength is its Rossby number: Ro = ζ/f, where the relative vorticity is ζ and the Coriolis frequency is f. Since Ro measures a gradient, the Ro of the wake eddies around Palau increases at smaller scales (Rudnick et al., 2019). In our study area around Velasco Reef, Palau (Figure 1b), the time-mean Ro in the wake eddy is about 0.3, but quasi-synoptic measurements show Ro ∼ 1 at 30-km scales (Zeiden et al., 2019). Drifters were also released in groups around Velasco and displayed Ro ∼ 5 at scales of 𝐴𝐴 (10 km) (Zeiden et al., 2022). These results are similar to Ro values from a mooring array and high-frequency radar with a similar spatial resolution (Merrifield et al., 2019;Zeiden et al., 2021). Rapid surveys from research vessels over 1-km scales show Ro reaches 50 at both the north and south points of Palau MacKinnon et al., 2019).