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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-341</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Daily Global Sea Surface Ageostrophic Current Dataset from 1993&amp;ndash;2023 via Physics-Informed Deep Learning</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cui</surname>
<given-names>Guangxi</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9021-3092</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yuen</surname>
<given-names>Ka-Veng</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Ying</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liu</surname>
<given-names>Zhiqiang</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-5981</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yang</surname>
<given-names>Dingqi</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6831-0422</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liu</surname>
<given-names>Guangliang</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff6">
<sup>6</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff7">
<sup>7</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cai</surname>
<given-names>Zhongya</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4733-9047</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, Department of Ocean Science and Technology, University of   Macau, Macau, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Center for Ocean Research in Hong Kong and Macau (CORE), Hong Kong, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University  of Macau, Macau, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Department of Ocean Science and Engineering and Center for Complex Flows and Soft Matter Research, Southern University  of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of  Macau, Macau, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff6">
<label>6</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Institute of Oceanographic Instrumentation, Shandong Academy of Sciences,  Jinan, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff7">
<label>7</label>
<addr-line>Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Jinan, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>13</day>
<month>05</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>26</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Guangxi Cui et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-341/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-341/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-341/essd-2026-341.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-341/essd-2026-341.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Surface ocean circulation shapes climate, air-sea exchange, and the transport of heat, carbon, and other tracers, yet most long-term satellite-based global datasets rely primarily on geostrophic balance and therefore miss important ageostrophic motions. Here, we reconstruct global daily sea surface circulation at 0.25&amp;deg; resolution from 1993 to 2023 using a physics-informed deep learning framework that integrates satellite altimetry with momentum constraints from geostrophic balance, wind stress, and nonlinear advection. The resulting dataset is dynamically consistent, with a mean momentum-balance error below 1.5 %, and reduces the median velocity error against independent mooring observations to 0.07 m s⁻&amp;sup1;, compared with 0.20 m s⁻&amp;sup1; for geostrophic currents and 0.10 m s⁻&amp;sup1; for Ekman-corrected currents. We show that geostrophic flow sets the large-scale circulation, whereas Ekman and nonlinear contributions are smaller but comparable in magnitude to each other. Although nonlinear advection contributes little to relative vorticity, it strongly shapes surface divergence and the fine-scale structure of eddy kinetic energy. Our results show that nonlinear ageostrophic flow is an essential component of global surface circulation and that neglecting it limits our ability to resolve surface transport and variability on climatically relevant scales.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="26"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>42376024, 42450181</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>Fundo para o Desenvolvimento das Ciências e da Tecnologia</funding-source>
<award-id>0093/2020/A2, 001/2024/SKL, SP2025-00005-CRO</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs3">
<funding-source>Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee</funding-source>
<award-id>AoE/P-601/23-N</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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