Do eddies ride on R ossby waves?

Both vortices and baroclinic Rossby waves show up as westward‐propagating features in the sea surface height anomaly (SSHA) records when displayed in the form of zonal‐temporal or Hovmöller diagrams. A chain of filters was used to separate the SSHA into orthogonal components. Each of the filtered components was then reassembled as a set of maps. In the maps of individual components, we clearly see westward propagating Rossby waves. Our most striking findings are: (i) limited within their critical latitudes, the wave extrema coincide with a significant number of vortices; (ii) eddy‐wave coincidence occurs at a preferred latitude that depends on the wave period; (iii) among the vortices that, at some point of their existence coincide with a wave, a relatively large percentage of them remained their whole lifetime with the wave, and (iv) a mechanism is proposed to explain why eddies tend to remain over the wave extrema (crests and troughs). Our answer to the title question is: yes, they often do.