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’600 meter and deeper beauty version’ of Perpetual Ocean 2: Western Boundary Currents. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

’600 meter and deeper beauty version’ of Perpetual Ocean 2: Western Boundary Currents. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

Perpetual Ocean 2: Western Boundary Currents (600 meter and deeper)

This is the '600 meter and deeper beauty version' of Perpetual Ocean 2: Western Boundary Currents showing only ocean currents below 600 meters in the Gulf Stream region. NASA’s ocean model, Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO), is used to visualize the currents. The ECCO ocean circulation model incorporates observations from spacecraft, buoys, and other in situ measurements to keep the model accurate. ECCO is a joint project between NASA/JPL and MIT. The model output used here is from ECCO-2 and covers the years 2021-2023.

In 2011, we used ECCO2 to create a visualization called Perpetual Ocean. Perpetual Ocean continues to be extremely popular, but it only shows ocean currents on the surface. In this new visualization, we use the ocean’s 3D velocity field to visualize some of the strongest ocean currents. We release virtual particles in the ocean and allow them to move with the ocean’s three dimensional velocity field. Each particle has a trail to better see its direction of movement. The particles initialized above 600 meters in depth have a trail length of 3 days, those initialized deeper than 600 meters have a trail length of 6 days. The particle trails help identify the strongest currents in the world that are squeezed in narrow belts on the western side of each ocean basin. These are called western boundary currents.

This visualization focuses on particles 600 m and deeper in the area of the Gulf Stream, a western boundary current. The Gulf Stream forms at the Florida Straits and is one of the fastest currents on Earth with surface speed of up to 2.5 meters per second. On the surface, the Gulf Stream moves warm water (>25°C) poleward. This visualization shows the return current underneath at depth below 500m (the blue particle trails) moving southward carrying cold waters from the pole.

Check out the 'beauty shot version' of the visualization.

View additional videos and still images at NASA SVS.