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Pictured is the vorticity at the surface of the ocean with red indicating clockwise rotation and blue indicating counter-clockwise rotation. Many small coherent eddies are visible. These eddies can rotate in either direction and can endure for a year or more. The sharp boundary between the broad red and blue regions is a fast-moving, meandering jet, analogous to the North Atlantic Gulf Stream.
This was done by a numerical simulation of an idealized, wind-driven ocean basin calculated on massively parallel computers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.Image credit: Jeffrey B. Weiss, University of Colorado Boulder
