Abstract
This article is an overview of what we have learned in recent years about the circulation of the western North Atlantic by direct observation with Sofar floats. These instruments, like their progenitor the Swallow float, are in essence tagged water parcels which allow us to obtain an explicit description of fluid motion over a wide range of space and time scales. On time scales of months to years the wandering of floats from one region to another yields information on the large-scale motions of water masses. In this sense floats may be viewed as a branch of modern hydrography. On time scales of days and weeks the floats are very effective tracers of mesoscale oceanic motion.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1983 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rossby, H.T., Riser, S.C., Mariano, A.J. (1983). The Western North Atlantic - A Lagrangian Viewpoint. In: Robinson, A.R. (eds) Eddies in Marine Science. Topics in Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69003-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69003-7_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-69005-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-69003-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive