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View of the currents surrounding the gyre. The North Atlantic Gyre of the Atlantic Ocean is one of five great oceanic gyres.It is a circular ocean current, with offshoot eddies and sub-gyres, across the North Atlantic from the Intertropical Convergence Zone (calms or doldrums) to the part south of Iceland, and from the east coasts of North America to the west coasts of Europe and Africa.
Cyclonic eddies rotate anticlockwise (clockwise) in the Northern (Southern) hemisphere and have a cold core. Anticyclonic eddies rotate clockwise (anticlockwise) in the Northern (Southern) hemisphere and have a warm core. The temperature and salinity difference between the eddy core and the surrounding waters is the key element driving vertical ...
Eddies that form in that current are distinctive as well. “If they pair up they’ll shoot across the whole of the Tasman Sea and also carry the same kinds of properties with them,” Hughes says.
The Great Whirl is a huge anti-cyclonic eddy generated by the Somali current flowing in (northern) summer, and one of the two gigantic Indian Ocean Gyres (the other is the Socotra Gyre). The Great Whirl can be observed between 5-10°N and 52-57°E off the Somali coast in the summer season, a location typically around 200 km southwest of the ...
In oceanography, a gyre (/ ˈ dʒ aɪ ər /) is any large system of ocean surface currents moving in a circular fashion driven by wind movements. Gyres are caused by the Coriolis effect; planetary vorticity, horizontal friction and vertical friction determine the circulatory patterns from the wind stress curl ().
A geostrophic current is an oceanic current in which the pressure gradient force is balanced by the Coriolis effect. The direction of geostrophic flow is parallel to the isobars , with the high pressure to the right of the flow in the Northern Hemisphere , and the high pressure to the left in the Southern Hemisphere .
The Alaska Current is a southwestern shallow warm-water current alongside the west coast of the North American continent beginning at about 48-50°N. The Alaska Current produces large clockwise eddies at two sites: west of the Haida Gwaii ("Haida Eddies") and west of Sitka, Alaska ("Sitka Eddy").
The North Atlantic Current is the first leg in the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre. The North Atlantic Current (NAC), also known as North Atlantic Drift and North Atlantic Sea Movement, is a powerful warm western boundary current within the Atlantic Ocean that extends the Gulf Stream northeastward.