Geology

Sea-surface height

Business

Meteorology

Potential vorticity

Altimeter

SWOT analysis

Mixed layer

Geodesy

Vortex

Marketing

Ocean surface topography

Paleontology

Ocean current

Geography

Vorticity

Context (archaeology)

Climatology

Ocean dynamics

Journal of Physical Oceanography

Reconstructability of upper-ocean vertical velocity w and vorticity ζ fields from high-resolution sea surface height (SSH) data is explored using the global 1/48° horizontal-resolution MITgcm output in the context of the forthcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission. By decomposing w with an omega equation of the primitive equation system and by taking into account the measurement design of the SWOT mission, this study seeks to reconstruct the subinertial, balanced w and ζ signals. By adopting the effective surface quasigeostrophic (eSQG) framework and applying to the Kuroshio Extension region of the North Pacific, we find that the target and reconstructed fields have a spatial correlation of ~0.7 below the mixed layer for w and 0.7–0.9 throughout the 1000-m upper ocean for ζ in the error-free scenario. By taking the SWOT sampling and measurement errors into account, the spatial correlation is found to decrease to 0.4–0.6 below the mixed layer for w and 0.6–0.7 for ζ , respectively. For both w and ζ reconstruction, the degradation due to the SWOT errors is more significant in the surface layer and for smaller-scale signals. The impact of errors lessens with the increasing depth and lengthening horizontal scales.

Reconstructing Upper-Ocean Vertical Velocity Field from Sea Surface Height in the Presence of Unbalanced Motion