A New Approach to Ocean Eddy Detection, Tracking, and Event Visualization –Application to the Northwest Pacific Ocean

Abstract

High-resolution ocean general circulation models have advanced the numerical study of ocean eddies. To gain an understanding of ocean eddies from the large volume of data produced by simulations, visualizing just the distribution of eddies at each time step is insufficient; time- variations in eddy events and phenomena must also be considered. However, existing methods cannot accurately detect and track eddy events such as amalgamation and bifurcation. In this study, we propose a new approach for eddy detection, tracking, and event visualization based on an eddy classification system. The proposed method detects streams and currents in addition to eddies, and it classifies detected eddies into several categories using the additional stream and current information. By tracking how the classified eddies vary over time, it is possible to detect events such as eddy amalgamation and bifurcation as well as the interaction between eddies and ocean currents. We visualize the detected eddies and events in a time series of images (or animation), enabling us to gain an intuitive understanding of a region of interest hidden in a high-resolution data set.