The surface of the ocean is filled with small vortices, fronts, meanders and filaments embedded within the larger-scale circulation. Described as the ocean ‘fine-scales’, they are suspected to affect the ocean circulation and the marine biome up to the climate scale by redistributing energy between scales and providing dynamical conduits connecting the ocean mixed layer to the interior. Yet, a fuller contemporary understanding of these processes, including accurate assessments of their impacts on the vertical transport and transfer of energy, has been lacking due to the scarcity of observations made at the required time-space scales.

In this work, we focus on the observation and characterization of ocean dynamics at high spatio-temporal scales in two different dynamical regions of the world ocean: the northwestern tropical Atlantic and the Agulhas Current Retroflection. This is undertaken using novel high-resolution observations from two different disconnected research experiments, including both in situ data collected by autonomous platforms and sea surface height measurements from the novel Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite altimeter.

Lieu
École normale supérieure – PSL
24 rue Lhomond – aile Erasme
salle Claude Froidevaux – E314

Zoom
https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/64195834147

• Laurent Bopp, CNRS (Examinateur)
• Isabelle Dadou, Université de Toulouse (Rapportrice)
• Alberto Naveira Garabato, Université de Southampton (Rapporteur)
• Ananda Pascual, CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) (Examinatrice)
• Fabien Roquet, Université de Göteborg (Invité)
• Sabrina Speich, École normale supérieure – PSL (Directrice de thèse)
• Sebastiaan Swart, Université de Göteborg (Co-directeur de thèse)