We aim to identify and understand the tracer-independent transport information contained in ocean tracer data. With collaborators, I have developed some new, powerful theoretical tools. Applications include:

• Diagnosing transport pathways, timescales, and water-mass composition in the North Atlantic ocean.
• Estimating the oceanic burden of anthropogenic carbon—the new methods have distinct advantages.
• Diagnosing and understanding the dynamics of sea-surface anomalies in temperature, salinity, height, and colour.
• Interpreting time-lagged correlations from oceanographic timeseries data.

I work on this topic with Miguel Jimenez Urias, Wenrui Jiang, Steve Griffies, and Darryn Waugh. For recent work, see Miguel’s 2023 JFM paper on scalar mixing, Wenrui’s paper on computing Lagrangian budgets, and this review paper on Green’s function methods for diagnosing tracer pathways and timescales in ocean models.