The life cycle of submesoscale eddies generated by topographic interactions

Morvan, Mathieu; L'Hégaret, Pierre; Carton, Xavier; Gula, Jonathan; Vic, Clément; de Marez, Charly; Sokolovskiy, Mikhail; Koshel, Konstantin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/os-15-1531-2019

Articles | Volume 15, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-15-1531-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/os-15-1531-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 6

Research article

|

22 Nov 2019

Research article |

| 22 Nov 2019

The life cycle of submesoscale eddies generated by topographic interactions

Mathieu Morvan, Pierre L'Hégaret, Xavier Carton, Jonathan Gula, Clément Vic, Charly de Marez, Mikhail Sokolovskiy, and Konstantin Koshel

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Final revised paper (published on 22 Nov 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 13 Mar 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of: 'The life cycle of submesoscale eddies generated by topographic interactions'', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 May 2019
- AC1: 'Responses to RC1', Mathieu Morvan, 13 Jul 2019
SC1: 'Comments to os-2019-3 "The life cycle of submesoscale eddies generated by topographic interactions"', Dmitry Stepanov, 29 May 2019
- AC2: 'Responses to SC1', Mathieu Morvan, 13 Jul 2019
RC2: 'Review of : The life cycle of submesoscale eddies generated by topographic interactions by Morvan et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 15 Jun 2019
- AC3: 'Response to RC2', Mathieu Morvan, 13 Jul 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Mathieu Morvan on behalf of the Authors (13 Jul 2019) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (19 Jul 2019) by Matthew Hecht

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (23 Jul 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (29 Aug 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have provided a substantive revision, and satisfactorily addressed my prior comments. I have some very small (trivial) suggestions that the authors might consider (listed below), but feel the manuscript is very nice, and acceptable regardless of whether they choose to make these changes or not.

Minor Comments:
1) Page 2 line 31: I still find the wording somewhat confusing, in that you refer to 'dense water' which you will model as a 'passive tracer', which of course it is not. I think you could clean this up (here and other places) a bit more by emphasizing that you will show that submesoscale eddies enhance passive particle dispersion in your model, which then has implications for understanding other forms of dispersion of particular watermasses, etc. (The subtlety here being that you are not showing anything directly about dense water dispersion).

2) Following up on my prior review minor comment #4, I don't think you've fully clarified in the text why you have 3 different definitions of diffusivity. In the reviewer response you mention what you use them for (short times, ballistic phase, long times) but don't give the reader (who may not be familiar with the particle dispersion literature) any sense of why different definitions are needed in each case. For instance, only the form given in (14) is familiar to me. On this note, I would also try to be a bit more clear that you transition in this one section from discussing dispersion by the 2 particular SCVs to dispersion of particles seeded in the SW part of the domain.

3) On page 19, paragraph starting on line 8: This is improved from the prior version, but it still feels a bit out of place, and not as strongly supported as the rest of the manuscript. For example, the claim that interaction between a SCV and a mesoscale eddy in a non-hydrostatic model 'will be important for onset of algae blooms' seems very speculative and non-obvious. If anything it would seem that interaction between surface mixed-layer eddies and SCVs (as you discuss at the end of the paragraph) might be a better candidate for generating enhanced nutrient fluxes. I would suggest taking another pass through these last two paragraphs and trying to improve the wording, and make them a little less speculative, as the study you present here is interesting without these broader speculations.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (11 Sep 2019) by Matthew Hecht

AR by Mathieu Morvan on behalf of the Authors (13 Sep 2019) Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (10 Oct 2019) by Matthew Hecht

AR by Mathieu Morvan on behalf of the Authors (11 Oct 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

The Persian Gulf Water and Red Sea Water are salty and dense waters recirculating in the Gulf of Oman and the Gulf of Aden, in the form of small features. We study the life cycle of intense and small vortices and their impact on the spread of Persian Gulf Water and Red Sea Water by using idealized numerical simulations. Small vortices are generated along the continental slopes, drift away, merge and form larger vortices. They can travel across the domain and participate in the tracer diffusion.