The global ocean has its own “weather” phenomena, although with greatly different time and space scales compared to the atmosphere. Oceanic mesoscale eddies are typically about 100 km in diameter which makes them 20–30 times smaller than comparable atmospheric highs and lows. The ocean’s “jet streams” are the western boundary currents and their extensions into the interior ocean. The currents have speeds on the order of 1 m/s compared to atmospheric speeds that can be 100 times this value. The space scales of the meanders on these high-speed streams are similar to those for the eddies mentioned above. Knowing and predicting these oceanic mesoscale features have numerous naval applications which include tactical planning, optimum track ship routing, search and rescue and supplying boundary conditions for high resolution coastal models, to name a few.

Rhodes, R.C., H.E. Hurlburt, A.J. Wallcraft, C.N. Barron, P.J. Martin, E.J. Metzger, J.F. Shriver, D.S. Ko, O.M. Smedstad, S.L. Cross, and A.B. Kara. 2002. Navy real-time global modeling systems. Oceanography 15(1):29–43, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2002.34.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.