About the project
Submesoscale motions are difficult to directly observe in the ocean. This project will leverage specialised processing of existing Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) measurements to enable a more detailed observational picture of the submesoscale. Using this novel perspective, the student will help refine our understanding of submesoscale currents and waves.
Ocean currents, eddies and inertia-gravity waves are ubiquitous features in the ocean, with important roles in the ocean's energy budget and the Earth's climate. They coexist at different space and time scales, and are often difficult to disentangle in ocean measurements. Shipboard Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) have been used for decades to study prominent mesoscale current systems (>10 km and >1day), such as the Gulf Stream and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. More recently, ADCPs have started to reveal characteristics of more elusive submesoscale motions.
However, the ability of these underway measurements to resolve submesoscale currents is constrained by the ADCP's frequency and electronic noise level, the quality of ship heading and attitude measurements, weather, and averaging choices. Therefore, understanding of both the instrumentation's capabilities and the observed phenomena's dynamics is indispensable for pushing the boundaries of what these measurements can reveal about the physics of submesoscales.
This project is an exciting opportunity to study submesoscale currents from a novel observational perspective. A first step will be to revisit existing datasets by reprocessing them from scratch using the Common Ocean Data Access System (CODAS) framework, accounting for differences in resolution, noise levels, and regional oceanography. The next steps will depend on the student's interests and could include incorporating analysis of model fields to enable a broader spatial context and to test some of the assumptions involved in the interpretation of the observations.
You will also be supervised by organisations other than the University of Southampton, including Dr André Palóczy, Dr Yvonne Firing and Dr Tiago Segabinazzi Dotto from the National Oceanography Centre.