Lagrangian and Eulerian observations of the surface circulation in the Tyrrhenian Sea
Enrico Zambianchi, Eleonora Rinaldi, Bruno Buongiorno Nardelli, Rosalia Santoleri, Pierre-Marie Poulain
Parthenope University, Napoli, Italy
(Abstract received 08/14/2009 for session A)
ABSTRACT
The circulation of the Tyrrhenian Sea is described first by a set of 53 surface drifters deployed in the area between December 2001 and February 2004. The Lagrangian data reveal a complex pattern of the circulation, especially in the southern portion of the Tyrrhenian, which is poorly known, dominated by semi-permanent recirculations and transient features which sometimes make it difficult to identify a consistent mean flow, while the northern sub-basin is characterized by a pair composed by a cyclonic and anticyclonic circulations known in the literature as North Tyrrhenian Cyclone and North Tyrrhenian Anticyclone. In order to supplement the drifter data with a more continuous in time sampling source, and to characterize the seasonal, inter-annual, as well as higher frequency variability of the surface circulation, the Lagrangian analysis is associated to a study of simultaneous satellite remotely-sensed altimeter. The investigation is based on the computation of the pseudo-Eulerian statistics from drifter data and on the comparison of these to the statistics obtained from the same binning and space-time averaging of altimeter data. This approach shows the representativeness of a joint analysis of altimeter and drifter data and yields useful indications about proper preliminary preprocessing and resampling procedures, so as to make the comparison statistically sound.
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