A Novel and Scalable Spatio-Temporal Technique for Ocean Eddy Monitoring

Swirls of ocean currents known as ocean eddies are a crucial component of the ocean’s dynamics. In addition to dominating the ocean’s kinetic energy, eddies play a significant role in the transport of water, salt, heat, and nutrients. Therefore, understanding current and future eddy patterns is a central climate challenge to address future sustainability of marine ecosystems. The emergence of sea surface height observations from satellite radar altimeter has recently enabled researchers to track eddies at a global scale. The majority of studies that identify eddies from observational data employ highly parametrized connected component algorithms using expert filtered data, effectively making reproducibility and scalability challenging. In this paper, we frame the challenge of monitoring ocean eddies as an unsupervised learning problem. We present a novel change detection algorithm that automatically identifies and monitors eddies in sea surface height data based on heuristics d...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: James H. Faghmous, Yashu Chamber, Shyam Boriah, Frode Vikebø, Stefan Liess, Michel dos Santos Mesquita, Vipin Kumar
• Keywords: AAAI 2012, Intelligent Agents, Ocean Eddies, Radar Altimeter, Sea Surface Height