Fig. 6

Simulated offshore Gulf Stream. Vertical vorticity (\(\zeta = \partial _x v - \partial _y u\)) normalized by f at the surface in the wintertime Gulf Stream after separation from the western boundary in a nested-subdomain simulation (Gula et al. 2015). Notice the meandering Gulf Stream in the center, the northern warm anticyclonic and southern cold cyclonic mesoscale Rings, and the nearly ubiquitous submesoscale features of many different types, including the typical open-sea “soup” away from strong mesoscale currents