Saturday Morning MARACOOS OceansMap Hurricane Figure Contest Winner

Its close enough to noon that we can declare Doug Wilson’s – from Ocean and Coastal Observing – Virgin Islands (OCO-VI) – contribution the winning hurricane figure of the morning.  It is a figure produced from MARACOOS OceansMap that plots the sea surface temperature from the Navy Global Ocean Forecast System (a HYCOM based model, hence the name in OceansMap, Navy HYCOM) in the Caribbean, with the temperatures enhanced to highlight the coastal upwelling along South America.  The more southerly track of Gonzalo is going right over the colder water.  Another important feature of the adjustable scales is that ability to highlight specific features, like that anticyclonic eddy south of Hispaniola that is not in MPIPOM.  This is an area begging for an Argo float comparison.  Something we can check into next week.

To not leave Hanna out of the mix, here is a similar plot for the Gulf of Mexico.  Here I adjusted the temperature scale so that it ranges from 25 to 32.  Our automated plots made overnight give us the ability to quickly browse for interesting subjects.  Then OceansMap enables the deep dive.  Again we have a story of coastal upwelling, both in front of Hanna, and very much along the Yucatan shelf.  You can see the cold upwelled Yucatan shelf water being pulled north along the Loop Current.  I wonder if images like this would help the NHC forecasts that have to define the edge of the Loop Current for the MPIPOM feature model initialization.  Maybe we can talk to them more about how they do that.  Another interesting feature is the Anticyclonic Eddy just north of Yucatan that was featured in the TS Cristobal blogs.  You can see this eddy has continued to propagate westward since Cristobal crossed directly over it along 90W.  Recall that this eddy is not in the MPIPOM model for Cristobal, since it needs to be inserted through the warm eddy feature model.

Last 5 posts by Scott Glenn

• Early Season in the Mid Atlantic - June 17th, 2021
• Disturbance in the Gulf - June 16th, 2021
• Hurricane Gliders 2021 - May 3rd, 2021
• Hurricane Iota - November 16th, 2020
• Hurricane Eta - Low Wind Shear, High SST - November 2nd, 2020