Yearly Animations of Northwest Atlantic Surface Temperature Showing the Interactions of Gulf Stream Rings and Meanders with the Shelf Water over Georges Bank and Browns Bank.

Richard Limeburner
WHOI
Woods Hole, MA
rlimeburner@whoi.edu
2/27/2000

Daily 3-day composite SST images of the Northwest Atlantic were obtained from the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab AVHRR web site and combined into yearly animations of ocean surface temperature for the period December 1996 to January 2000. The objective of this effort was to document the times when Gulf Stream rings entrained shelf water and/or intruded slope water onto the shelf near Georges Bank and Browns Bank.
The animations are in a flc format and require a player. Sources of free players are available from http://www.gromada.com/index.html (the Moyager PC player) and http://globec.whoi.edu/globec-dir/aaplay.html. In the near future these animations will automatically play over the Internet without installing the players.
The JHUAPL SST data archives begin December 1996 for the Gulf Stream region and the yearly animations are named sst97.flc, sst98.flc, and sst99.flc. The 60-m and 200-m isobaths were laid over the SST imagery and a time stamp was added. The date of each SST image corresponds to the center of a 3-day window of images that were made into a composite image.
The monthly locations of Gulf Stream rings was located in the animations and plotted below for each year. Note the anomalously high number of rings in 1999.

Figure 1. 1997 monthly ring positions JPEG, PNG.
Figure 2. 1998 monthly ring positions JPEG, PNG.
Figure 3. 1999 monthly ring positions JPEG, PNG.

The presence of GS Ring Water (R) and Warm Slope Water (S) north of the 200-m isobath on the south side of Georges Bank is shown for 1997 (Table 1), 1998 (Table 2, not available), and 1999 (Table 3, not available).