Maybe some light rain, a thunderstorm, a tornado, a blizzard?

There are a ton of different weather phenomena in our atmosphere.

But have you ever thought about the possibility of weather in our oceans?

Some of the same causes of atmospheric weather exist in the ocean, too.

And it can impact marine wildlife just like a storm affects us.

So let's take a look at the weather underwater.

If you've ever listened to a weather report, you've probably heard the word front being thrown around.

A meteorologist is talking about air masses that differ in temperature, wind, and humidity.

And in the ocean, fronts are pretty similar.

That's where water masses of different properties meet.

Instead of differences in temperature, wind, and humidity, you've got differences in temperature, salinity, density, and more.

Ocean fronts also move around as currents and winds interact with them.

So just like meteorologists track the movement of these boundaries in the atmosphere, oceanographers are working to improve how we track them in the ocean.

And ocean fronts can be really important for marine wildlife.

Let's start with plankton.

The gradients of temperature, salinity, and other water properties reduce the amount of mixing at these frontal zones.

With limited mixing, phytoplankton are carried to deeper water, allowing them to stay in the brightly lit surface waters, providing them with the opportunity to photosynthesize.

Phytoplankton are the base of the food web, so if there's an increase in phytoplankton, it will start to attract larger lifeforms.

Zooplankton eat the phytoplankton, fish eat the zooplankton, and so on.

For example, seabirds are frequently found at the borders of ocean fronts, especially king penguins and albatrosses.

And so are filter-feeding basking sharks.

In some areas, they seem to follow the fronts as they shift, probably taking advantage of elevated levels of zooplankton.

They have to follow the food, stock the snacks, pursue the provisions.

You get the idea.

So you can see why marine scientists like me care about ocean fronts.

They give us a lot more information than just if we'll need an umbrella that day.

Eddies are another type of underwater weather, but they're a bit different than the eddies in the atmosphere.

Those are essentially whirls of air.

Rather than air moving in a straight, streamlined way, it moves in a more turbulent, circular motion.

They're often caused by an obstruction of a smoother airflow by something like a building or a mountain.

Some aeronautic courses even explicitly mention these eddies because they can cause turbulence, especially for smaller aircrafts and drones.

In the ocean, they're on a much larger scale, like 10 to 100 kilometers in diameter.

And they can persist for months.

While you can have smaller eddies that create turbulent flow of water like the atmospheric eddies I mentioned, these eddies are created when they break off of a larger ocean current.

For this reason, they're a bit more like atmospheric storms.

They trap water from one water mass in a different water mass with different properties, like temperature and salinity.

And there are a few different types.

Cold core rings are essentially when colder water gets trapped in warmer water.

They produce an upwelling effect, drawing up nutrients from deeper water towards the surface.

And this is perfect for photosynthesis.

And photosynthesis is dope.

Hello, phytoplankton productivity.

Warm core rings are the opposite.

This is where warmer water is getting trapped in cooler water, and they produce a downwelling effect.

This shunts warmer surface water into the cold depth.

It's almost like a portal for deep-diving animals like sharks that allows them to stay deeper for longer by releasing them from temperature constraints they experience while diving.

Which is a pretty cool trick for a swirl of water.

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Okay, we have finally reached what is, in my opinion, the most confusing of our three underwater weather systems.

Gravity waves.

Not to be confused with gravitational waves.

Gravity waves are called this because gravity is the restoring force here that is essentially working to flatten the waves back out into a plane.

In our atmosphere, you may have seen them in the form of these weird clouds that look like ripples on a pond.

And that's essentially what they are.

But instead of throwing a stone into water, it's an updraft of air that disturbs an otherwise stable air mass to create such an effect in the sky.

It's similar in the ocean, but rather than a ripple on top, it's an internal wave, a wave beneath the ocean's surface.

Instead of the wave happening at the interface of water and air at the surface like you'd see on a beach, it's a wave that moves along the boundary of two water masses that are separated because of their differences in density or temperature, a water and water interface.

These internal waves can be caused by a lot of different things, but really anything that would cause a displacement of water can create them.

A great example is the movement of the mixed layer based on the winds.

What is the mixed layer?

It's the surface layer of the ocean where you see a lot of mixing due to heat flux, salinity, and other properties.

The stronger the winds, the more mixing there will be, and the deeper the mixed layer will be.

This deepening or shallowing of the mixed layer causes a displacement of water at that water and water interface that I mentioned.

Now you've got a wave propagating along that boundary, an internal wave.

And like the other underwater weather we've talked about, large internal waves have an important part to play in sustaining ocean life.

They may dampen the effects of heat stress on corals.

When corals get too stressed from high temperature, they expel from their body the algae that helps them make food.

Without them, the coral can die.

This is called coral bleaching, and it is devastating to our reefs.

But one study shows that large internal waves may bring in cooler waters and additional nutrients and plankton that the corals can use for food, limiting the severity of these bleaching events.

A site that was cut off from the effects of internal waves experienced more bleaching than a site that did experience internal waves.

So even if they're a little hard to understand, gravity waves can be lifesavers.

And these are just a few examples of ocean weather.

There are even more physical processes down there that affect wildlife.

We have some pretty interesting weather phenomena up here, but so do our ocean-dwelling friends.

I wonder if fish ever make awkward small talk about the weather, too.