In the present work mesoscale eddies of the Western Mediterranean are being investigated by means of thermal imagery and altimetry data. Comparison of 1489 anticyclonic and 782 cyclonic eddy manifestations found in sea surface temperature (SST) imagery on an analysis of a 3-year-long dataset (covering the period from 2011 to 2013) with corresponding sea level anomaly (SLA) fields showed that only anticyclonic eddies exceeding ca. 70 km in diameter can be more or less sustainably manifested in the fields of SLA and its derivatives (such as relative vorticity). Detection of cyclonic eddies on base of SLA data, presumably due to the small spatial and temporal scales of such eddies and their non-geostrophic nature, is problematic.
展开▼
