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Takaya Uchida

Publications and source records attributed to Takaya Uchida.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

A strictly geostrophic product of sea-surface velocities from the SWOT fast-sampling phase

While geostrophy remains the simplest and most practical balance to extract velocity information from sea-surface height anomaly (SSHa), confusions remain within the oceanographic community to what extent this balance can be applied to altimetric observations with the launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite. Given the limited temporal resolution of SWOT, many studies have resorted to claiming that the spatially filtered SSHa fields correspond to the geostrophic component. This introduces the ambiguity of which spatial scale to choose. Here, we build upon the recent developments in internal tide (IT) corrections (Yadidya et al., 2025) and apply a dynamic mode decomposition (DMD)-based method introduced by Lapo et al. (2025) to robustly extract the geostrophic component associated with sub-inertial frequencies from the SWOT one-day-repeat orbit; we distribute the global dataset as a public good. We provide the joint probability density function (PDF) of vorticity and strain, and spectra of SSHa at a few cross-over regions.

physics.ao-ph

Dynamic-Mode Decomposition of Geostrophically Balanced Motions from SWOT Altimetry

The decomposition of oceanic flow into its balanced and unbalanced motions carries theoretical and practical significance for the oceanographic community. These two motions have distinct dynamical characteristics and affect the transport of tracers differently from one another. The launch of Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite provides a prime opportunity to diagnose the surface balanced and unbalanced motions on a global scale at an unprecedented spatial resolution. Here, we apply dynamic-mode decomposition (DMD), a linear-algebraic data-driven method, to a tidally-forced numerical simulation and one-day-repeat SWOT observations of sea-surface height (SSH) in the Gulf Stream extension. DMD is able to separate out the spatial modes associated with sub-inertial periods from super-inertial periods. The sub-inertial modes of DMD can be used to extract geostrophically balanced motions from SSH fields, which have an imprint of internal tides and gravity waves. We utilize the statistical relation between relative vorticity and strain rate as the metric to gauge the extraction of geostrophy.

physics.ao-ph