The shifting patterns of ocean currents shape our climate and weather. Even today, understanding how ocean currents behave is challenging. But researchers have developed an AI tool that can map currents across large swaths of the ocean with a level of detail previously unachievable.
The team from the University of California, San Diego, published their work in the journal Nature Geoscience on April 13. They trained an AI network using thermal imagery from weather satellites in an approach they call GOFlow (Geostationary Ocean Flow).
“We can now observe small, fast-changing ocean currents from space with much greater detail and frequency than before,” Luc Lenain, an oceanographer at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the study’s first author, told CNET. “Those currents are important because they help control how heat, carbon, nutrients and pollutants move through the ocean.”
Ebbs and flows
A few years ago, while Lenain was looking through
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