Enhancing the accuracy of automatic eddy detection and the capability of recognizing the multi-core structures from maps of sea level anomaly

[摘要] Automated methods are important for automatically detecting mesoscale eddiesin large volumes of altimeter data. While many algorithms have been proposedin the past, this paper presents a new method, called hybrid detection (HD),to enhance the eddy detection accuracy and the capability of recognizing eddymulti-core structures from maps of sea level anomaly (SLA). The HD method hasintegrated the criteria of the Okubo–Weiss (OW) method and the sea surfaceheight-based (SSH-based) method, two commonly used eddy detection algorithms.Evaluation of the detection accuracy shows that the successful detection rateof HD is ~ 96.6% and the excessive detection rate is~ 14.2%, which outperforms the OW and those methods using SLAextrema to identify eddies. The capability of recognizing multi-corestructures and its significance in tracking eddy splitting or merging eventshave been illustrated by comparing with the detection results of differentalgorithms and observations in previous literature.

[学科分类] 海洋学与技术