Better late than never, I learned to enlarge plots of sea surface height (SSH) in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) on the monitor screen by hitting Ctrl and + multiple times. Now I can actually see two clockwise eddies trapped in the Loop Current (LC) running into each other and piling up water. This destroys some of their individual vorticities, creates SSH as high as 150 cm where their respective peripheral velocities collide. This creates a steep ramp of SSH whose downhill direction is pointed in the downstream direction toward Florida. The ramp is always located on the north coast of Cuba near Los Orroyos at the west end close to where the two capes are joined to the wider part of the island.
I also learned to hit Prt Scr to copy the expanded screen into the Clipboard so that I can paste it into Word. I don't do this too often because it generates too many printouts when I watch the annihilation events at one-day intervals. Sometimes the SSH labels obscure the SSH contours and I have to go back-and-forth between annotated and un-annotated SSH contours, as well as view successive days to follow the progress of a particular feature. The selection page of the website has a strange appearance when it is expanded, but I have become quite familiar with it and can navigate easily.
The expanded plots also enable me to identify the highest SSH contour coming directly from the Caribbean Sea, as distinguished from the contours recirculating along the north coast of Cuba. It appears that a sudden increase in SSH coming from the Caribbean signals the arrival of a new eddy that is about to be trapped inside the Loop. It will take some time to plot these daily SSH values and correlate them with the fate of each eddy that gets trapped. Some get annihilated, and some push through the corridor formed by the LC intrusion and emerge from the end of the intrusion, where they may remain connected to the Loop for months before drifting westward in the GoM. I will have close to 20 years of data to plot and correlate in order to determine whether a change in behavior has happened over this time. A change might be due to climate change, or it might be part of a cycle that has not completed.
Now that I am getting solid data, I don't want to rush to a conclusion. I have come up with too many wrong hypotheses already, and this old dog is learning to be careful.
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