Impact of high-frequency motions on oceanic surface dispersion

Understanding the oceanic surface dispersion has important applications in ocean pollution scenarios. Of the different ocean pollution events, some of which have the most impact both on the marine environment and, on society and economy are: marine plastics, oil spills and Sargassum inundation events. Understanding the ocean dynamics that affect their trajectories is vital to simulate their pathways, and thus know their sources and sinks. This can then be used to implement clean-up strategies and to better manage MPAs. It can also help reduce the impact of ocean pollution on the marine environment and some major economic sectors like tourism. High frequency motions have an important impact on the surface dynamics, but high temporal resolution data is necessary to study their effects. New datasets and methodologies have allowed to obtain better representations of high frequency motions. Here, we specifically focus on the high frequency motions due to tides (like for example internal waves), as well as inertial oscillations. We simulate surface trajectories of plastic, oil and Sargassum using the OceanParcels Lagrangian simulator. We focus on three regions in the Atlantic Ocean: Açores Islands, North Atlantic and Tropical Atlantic, respectively. For the plastic simulations we look at the effect of tides by using velocity outputs from a high-resolution model which is a twin simulation without and with tidal forcing. For the oil spills and Sargassum outputs we use a new surface currents product generated by combining velocity data from drifters, high-frequency winds and altimetry to reconstruct high-frequency surface currents. We find that considering high-frequency motions is key to correctly simulate their surface trajectories, but that further work is necessary to understand the ocean dynamics at the fine-scales that can drive the variability in these Lagrangian trajectories.