Neutral Surface Topology

I’m super proud that former graduate student, Geoff Stanley‘s outstanding sole-author paper on Neutral Surface Topology has been published in Ocean Modelling. This should redefine how we calculate neutral surfaces in the ocean. A huge bonus is that they are extremely fast to compute: 50s for the surface shown below, versus 12hrs for the equivalent omega surface (the previous gold standard).

Topological regions (colours) for pressure ( ~ depth) on a σ2 potential density surface, used to initialise the algorithm to create a topobaric surface. Within each coloured region, the density is an empirically-fitted single-valued function of pressure. Grey regions indicate the isopycnal has outcropped or grounded, or has disconnected from the main surface.

Leave a Reply