Feature Location and Variability (FLAVAR)
Abstract
This report presents research conducted during the research project entitled Feature Location and Variability, or FLAVAR. The project had several goals, and the results are presented here. The report focuses on oceanic fronts, or locations where the ocean structure changes significantly over a short distance. These changes are identifiable in temperature, salinity, sea surface height, and sometimes ocean color. Goals of the project included characterizing semi-permanent fronts in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingtom (GIUK) region of the North Atlantic Ocean and developing an automated tracking algorithm capable of identifying these fronts without human intervention from maps of satellite altimetry or sea surface temperature.Overall, the project was successful. First, this document will describe the initial efforts to describe and delineate variability of gradients and average location and boundaries of fronts within the GIUK region; the initial analysis of one of these fronts and the aspects of temporal and spatial variability of fronts that can be learned from this analysis. Second, an analysis of how model results are related to spatial variability will be analyzed. Third, the details of a higher-level, more sophisticated approach of a search tree frontal detection approach will be explained, and examples of its use in the GIUK region presented. Finally we discuss the ways in which frontal locations from different variables can be combined to give an integrated frontal location that includes input from all sources (observed and modeled, whether temperature, salinity, sea surface height or ocean color). The results from this project lay the groundwork for development of a robust, operational automated frontal detection system.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 29, 2023
- Accession Number
- AD1198323
Entities
People
- David J. Lewis
- Elizabeth Douglass
- Igor G. Shulman
- Zhitao Yu
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory