A couple of months ago AGU blogger Dan Satterfield posted a great article titled The Turbulence of Van Gogh and the Labrador Shelf Current.

For getting maps and art together, I thought it could not be topped. Then today, I stumbled into NASA’s Perpetual Ocean animation: beautiful!

From the original Source: This is an animation of ocean surface currents from June 2005 to December 2007 from NASA satellites. Watch how bigger currents like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean and the Kuroshio in the Pacific carry warm waters across thousands of miles at speeds greater than four miles per hour (six kilometers per hour); how coastal currents like the Agulhas in the Southern Hemisphere move equatorial waters toward Earth’s poles; and how thousands of other ocean currents are confined to particular regions and form slow-moving, circular pools called eddies. Credit: NASA/SVS

Related sites

More media options, including a 20 minute version at 30 fps can be found here

MIT general circulation model MITgcm

ECCO2: Phase II of MIT/JPL project Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean