Comparison of Non-hurricane and Hurricane Induced Near Inertial Oscillations in Deep Water of Gulf of Mexico

By using oil platform based ADCPs on the continental slope, some time series and spectrum analyses are implemented to examine the general flow distributions including those of the near inertial oscillations and their temporal variations along the vertical water columns for the Gulf of Mexico during different time periods in the year of 2005 and 2006, particularly in 2005, when a few hurricanes struck the Gulf of Mexico coast of the US, causing tremendous amount of damages. Among these hurricanes are the infamous Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. However, during the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, most of the acoustic Doppler current profilers from oil platforms and moorings were not functioning and only a couple of the deep water ADCPs were collecting data during the storms. This paper presents some preliminary studies analyzing the ADCP data using different methods, such as rotary spectra and wavelet analysis. The rotary spectra of the velocity showed interesting patterns of inertial oscillations before, during, and after the hurricanes.