Abstract
A mesoscale ocean eddy can live for years as it propagates across ocean basins, but the water contained within its core may remain for only a fraction of that time. We argue that ocean eddies exhibit multiple timescales: A persistence time associated with the lifetime of the eddy and (multiple) material coherence timescales that measure how leaky the eddy is. Here we study an ocean eddy in the South Atlantic using virtual ocean drifters. Our results suggest that we should revise how we think about ocean eddies to include not only the long-lived coherent eddy core but also the quasi-coherent outer ring, where we speculate that the outer ring is responsible for most of the eddy transport.
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