The Lagrangian description of aperiodic flows: a case study of the Kuroshio Current
| by C. Mendoza, A. M. Mancho |
| Output type: publication |
 URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.3496 |
In this article we review several recently developed Lagrangian tools and
propose their properly combined use for achieving a detailed description of
purely advective transport events in general aperiodic flows. In particular,
because of the climate impact of ocean transport processes, we illustrate an
application on altimeter data sets over the area of the Kuroshio Current.
First, a global Lagrangian descriptor recently described in (Mendoza & Mancho, 2010) is used on the dataset. Over the ocean surface a phase portrait is represented where the geometry of interconnected dynamical systems is visible. The organising centres of the flow are located at a glance: hyperbolic points -related to highly dispersive regions- and non-hyperbolic areas that are related to confinement regions. The phase portrait picture is very helpful to foresee which transport routes can be deduced from the stable and unstable manifolds of the easily identified distinguished hyperbolic trajectories (see Madrid & Mancho 2009) of the flow.
