Written by Alan Buis
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, CA – The swirling flows of Earth’s perpetually changing ocean come to life in a new NASA scientific visualization that captures the movement of tens of thousands of ocean currents.
Developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, the visualization is based on a synthesis of a numerical model with observational data. The model was created under a NASA project called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, or ECCO.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yes_QdJQLA[/youtube]
ECCO model-data syntheses are being used to quantify the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle; to understand the recent evolution of the polar oceans; to monitor time-evolving heat, water, and chemical exchanges within and between different components of the Earth system; and for many other science applications.
Data used by the ECCO project include: sea surface height from JPL’s Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 satellite altimeters; gravity from the JPL/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission; surface wind stress from JPL’s QuikScat mission; sea surface temperature from the NASA/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS; sea ice concentration and velocity data from passive microwave radiometers; and temperature and salinity profiles from shipborne casts, moorings and the international Argo ocean observation system.
These model-data syntheses are among the largest computations of their kind ever undertaken. They are made possible by high-end computing resources provided by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.
JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA.
The high-definition visualization is available in 3-minute and 20-minute versions at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3827 .
For more information, visit: www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/perpetual-ocean.html .