Below is a movie of surface Temperature at the New River Inlet on May 7th 2012 during the ONR-funded RIVET I experiment.   The temperature is derived by combining airborne IR (Luc Lenain in Ken Melville’s group at SIO) with in situ temperature sensors.   The top panel shows the tide level and the arrow to the right shows the currents within the inlet (at the red dot) from the WHOI (Raubenheimer/Elgar) ADCP 05.  All times are in EDT.

The movie can be better viewed if you click to view it full frame.  In it one can clearly see the warm jets coming out the two inlet channels.  Much of the newchannel warm plume gets turned on the bathymetry coutours and heads in the -y direction.  In addition, the alongshore (-y) propagation hugging the coast of the warm water plume is clearly evident. This plume is about 1 deg C warmer than the water 500 m offshore.    The winds and the waves on this day were relatively strong and came from the -y quadrant, driving strong flows to the south.

The mp4 version of this movie can be downloaded here