Eddy induced anomalies in the global ocean: new insights from wide-swath altimetry

Satellite altimetry has made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of ocean circulation during more than three decades, the so-called altimetry era. The wide-swath altimetry concept explored by the SWOT mission has started a new one, the SWOT-era. As SWOT extends the capability of nadir altimeters to two-dimensional mapping and sampling of the ocean surface at an unprecedented spatial resolution, this has opened the opportunity to constrain better the mesoscale variability, also in areas with a reduced number of the available altimetry missions and small Rossby radii. The results presented in this work rely on a comparison of SWOT retrievals with conventional altimeters and characterize the representation of the mesoscale field in the global ocean emerging from the different altimetry concepts. While this study aims to an assessment of the eddy-induced anomalies at the surface in the global ocean, specific areas of interest along the boundary currents and eddy-rich areas, were selected to investigate the mesoscale contributions to ocean dynamics and thermodynamics (heat transport) building on satellite sensor synergies. The detailed knowledge of the mesoscale eddies (number, size, polarity) is then used to design and train a machine-learning (ML) based detection of the eddies. The accuracy of the results is assessed against the dynamical-based approach applied to the same output fields.