A Practical Separation of Oceanic Vortical and Wavy Motions Entangled in the SWOT Measurements

作者：Chuanyin Wang, Zhiyu Liu, Hongyang Lin, Dake Chen, Qinghua Yang, Qinbiao Ni · 发表于：Geophysical Research Letters · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1029/2024gl113995 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes、Geophysics and Gravity Measurements、Climate variability and models

Abstract The recently launched Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite provides an unprecedented two‐dimensional measurement of the sea surface height (SSH) down to the oceanic submesoscale of 1–10 km. Using this measurement to make substantial progress requires the separation of vortical and wavy motions owing to their contrasting ramifications for the energy transfer; however, the separation is extremely challenging due to the long‐repeat period of the SWOT satellite. To achieve a practical separation, here we adopt the linear normal‐mode initialization technique used in numerical weather prediction. This separation method requires velocity data in addition to SSH. With concurrent measurements of SSH and velocity respectively from SWOT and the offshore high‐frequency radar (HFR) system, this separation method proves valid and useful. The present study is expected to stimulate new discoveries associated with oceanic multiscale interactions and energy transfers.