- NASA’s ECCO Model Transforms Ocean Research.
- Decades of Ocean Data Come to Life in New Visualization.
- Van Gogh-Like Swirls Show the Ocean’s Hidden Patterns.
The stunning video above comes alive and illustrates ocean currents moving around the world. Employing data from spacecraft, buoys, and other measurement instruments, the animation displays eddying currents that look like Van Gogh’s brushwork, reports Open Culture.
Challenges in Modeling Ocean Currents
NASA highlights the historical difficulty of modelling ocean currents. According to NASA: “The ocean has been [historically] difficult to model. Scientists struggled in years past to simulate ocean currents or accurately predict fluctuations in temperature, salinity, and other properties. As a result, models of ocean dynamics rapidly diverged from reality, which meant they could only provide useful information for brief periods.”
ECCO: A Breakthrough in Ocean Modeling
To address these challenges, NASA and its partners developed ECCO, which stands for “Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean.” This model integrates satellite and sensor data to create a highly accurate, physics-based reconstruction of ocean behaviour. As NASA explains: “By applying the laws of physics to data from multiple satellites and thousands of floating sensors, NASA scientists and their collaborators built ECCO to be a realistic, detailed, and continuous ocean model that spans decades.”
Understanding Ocean Dynamics at an Unprecedented Scale
ECCO has transformed ocean research by providing long-term, highly detailed models of ocean circulation. NASA states: “The project provides models that are the best possible reconstruction of the past 30 years of the global ocean. It allows us to understand the ocean’s physical processes at scales that are not normally observable.”
Bringing Ocean Data to Life
The visualization above provides a dramatic representation of ocean currents, giving an idea of the capability of ECCO to trace the complex movement of the ocean over decades.
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Source: Open Culture
