NASA mission will study how hidden ocean swirls soak up heat of global warming

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https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-mission-will-study-hidden-ocean-swirls-soak-heat-global-warming

By Paul Voosen, Science. 

Excerpt: Eddies have been overlooked for too long. These turbulent swirls of water, ranging in size from a few kilometers to hundreds of kilometers across, peel off large ocean currents and mix heat and carbon dioxide into deeper ocean layers, like cream stirred into coffee. They are the most energetic feature of the ocean, critical to getting climate models right—but also largely invisible to satellites.... No longer. Eddies and, on land, the ebb and flow of rivers and lakes will snap into focus after the launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, a joint venture between NASA and CNES, the French space agency. ...The satellite will capture eddies as small as 7 kilometers across and cover nearly the entire globe every 21 days. On land, SWOT will be able to map the changing height of more than 6 million lakes, from the Great Lakes down to ponds, while also capturing flows in rivers wider than 100 meters. It will ...make the field of hydrology far more empirical, and global, than it ever has been. “It’s going to help us constrain how the water cycle works in the Arctic, Africa—places where we don’t have on the ground data,” says Tamlin Pavelsky, a hydrologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and co-lead of SWOT’s freshwater science team. ...SWOT ...will test predictions that thousands of small eddies stir the ocean at any one time, .... Eddies just a few kilometers across likely play a critical role in stirring heat and carbon into the oceans near the poles, Morrow says. They also drive the mixing in smaller seas, she says. “We’re probably underestimating the energy in the Mediterranean by 90% because we’re missing these smaller scale structures.” At the coastlines, SWOT will provide a detailed picture of how hot spots of sea level rise in the open ocean influence coastal inundation.... 

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