Tom George, Georgy Manucharyan, Andrew Thompson

Oceans play a major role in Earths climate by storing and transporting heat via turbulent currents called mesoscale eddies. However, direct monitoring of eddy-driven heat fluxes is currently impossible because it requires simultaneous surface and subsurface observations of velocity and heat content, while only surface properties of mesoscale eddies can be comprehensively measured by satellites in the form of sea surface height (SSH) anomalies. Nonetheless, surface and subsurface expressions of eddies are dynamically linked, suggesting that surface observations may contain at least partial information about subsurface flows and thus heat transport. Here we used deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to demonstrate that SSH expressions of mesoscale turbulence contain sufficient information to predict about 64\% of eddy heat flux variance, with CNNs significantly outperforming other conventional data-driven techniques. Our results suggest that deep CNNs could provide an effective pathway towards an operational monitoring of eddy heat fluxes using satellite altimetry.