Figure 2
From: Oceanic vortex mergers are not isolated but influenced by the β-effect and surrounding eddies
Characteristics of the merging events from the HYCOM dataset. In each panel, blue and red indicate Anticyclonic Eddies (AEs) and Cyclonic Eddies (CEs) respectively. (A) Type of eddies which merge; the distribution is normalized by the number of eddies per type (we take into account the fact that more AEs are detected). (B) Ro and Bu distribution, contours are [1,2,3,4,5] % values of 2D histograms. (C) Normalized distribution of the orientation of merging eddies; a bin reaching 0.2 means that it represents 20% of the total merging events for a given polarity. Errorbars show ± the standard deviation in each bin using a Monte Carlo Bootstrapping method with 10,000 re-sampling. (D) Same as (C) for the Ro ratio between merging eddies. (E) Same as (C) for the standard deviation of the Coriolis parameter outside eddies, divided by the mean value of Coriolis parameter in the same area —the ‘outside’ is defined as the area inside a circle of radius two times the distance between the merging eddies. (F) Same as (C) for the vorticity variance ratio between the areas outside and inside merging eddies, as defined in Eq. (4) —the ‘inside’ area corresponds to the area defined by the two eddy contours when the merging is detected. (G) Same as (B), for the number of neighbouring eddies detected outside eddies, depending on their polarity. Blue and red crosses indicate the mean number of neighbouring eddies for AEs and CEs respectively: on average, 0.93 (resp. 1.74) AEs, and 1.86 (resp. 0.92) CEs surround merging AEs (resp. CEs). (H) Position of the nearest edges of the neighbouring eddies; the grey scale indicates the value of a 2D histogram, and the black bold circle presents the chosen edge of the β-disk in idealized simulations. (I) Same as (C) for the merging distance dm = d/R, where d is the Euclidean distance between the two eddy centers when they merge, and R is the average of the R values between the first detection of the eddy and the merger; dashed and dotted lines show the distributions of dm for which R is equal to the mean value of R in each bin, plus or minus the standard deviation of R in this bin. Details about the calculation of quantities in each panel are presented in the ‘Methods’ section.
