Jorge F. Willemsen and George R. Halliwell, RSMAS/Univ. of Miami
In this note we display results of recent simulations in the Florida Keys tract with a focus on studying the structure of the vertical velocity throughout the study regime. We find that while barotropic floats constrained to remain at 5 m. depth can spend as much as 1 month entrained in one of several gyres, the most famous one being the Tortugas gyre, once they are allowed to respond to vertical motion in the water column the emerging picture is much more complicated. Often but not always the floats that persist in a geographical location do so by spiraling downward and upward, thus spending much less time near the surface than implied by the barotropic experiment. This has potentially important implications in interpreting larval dispersal in this region. We also study the correlation between horizontally convergent and divergent flows with upwelling and downwelling vertical flows.