Background stratification impacts on internal tide generation and abyssal propagation in the western equatorial Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay

The forthcoming SWOT altimetric missions aim to resolve the mesoscale with an unprecedented spatial resolution and swath. However, high-frequency processes, such as tides, are undersampled in time and aliased onto lower frequencies, so they need to be corrected properly. Unlike barotropic tides, internal tides (ITs) are not completely stationary and have significant temporal variability due to their interactions with the ocean circulation and the stratification variability. Stratification changes impact both the generation and the propagation of ITs. The present study proposes a methodology to quantify the impacts of background stratification using a clustering method for the classification of a broad range of stratification and idealized modeling of ITs in the frequency domain.