Past Research

Oceanic Rossby waves

I have spent a large fraction of my scientific career trying to rationalise the observations by Chelton and Schlax (1996) of "too-fast Rossby waves'', which has resulted in about 10 papers. As the discrepancy between theory and observations arises from using a theory that neglects such effects as mean flow, topography, nonlinearities, friction, forcing, and so on, it is probably not surprising to find some discrepancy. Alternatively, since the discrepancy is not that large, to be amazed that the standard theory does not that badly. In any case, I spent a lot of time trying to understand how the background mean flow and topography combines to modify the propagation speed of the oceanic Rossby waves. This was before Dudley Chelton and collaborators decided a few years later that what they had initially interpreted as waves were probably eddies. The new interpretation is therefore that althought there might be some underlying weak soup of linear oceanic Rossby waves, they are dominated by a strong meso-scale eddies signal. What is amazing is that eddies appear to have a speed close to that of the linear Rossby waves despite being often strongly nonlinear, and being the sum of an infinite many linear Rossby waves. This is something I don't quite understand, and it is not clear from the literature if anyone does. I hope to return to the issue some time, but hopefully, someone will solve the issue, and I won't need to bother any more.