From the planning days preceding the establishment of the US Global
Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) program, modeling was recognized as one
of the program’s pillars. In particular, predictions of future ecosystem states in an
evolving climate system required new interdisciplinary approaches that brought
together physicists, biologists, modelers, and observational scientists....
THE ROLE OF THE OCEANS in Earth systems ecology, and the effects of climate variability on the ocean and its ecosystems, can be understood only by observing, describing, and ultimately predicting the state of the ocean as a physically forced ecological and biogeochemical system. This is a daunting but exciting...
The Oregon Coastal Transition Zone (OCTZ) extends several hundred
kilometers offshore where shelf flows interact with the northern California Current. A
primitive-equation numerical ocean model is used to study the upwelling circulation in this
region from 1 May to 1 November 2001. This OCTZ model obtains initial and boundary
conditions...
This study examines how coastal banks influence wind-driven circulation along stratified continental shelves. Numerical experiments are conducted for idealized symmetric banks; the standard bank (200 km long and 50 km wide) has dimensions similar to the Heceta Bank complex along the Oregon shelf. Model runs are forced with 10 days...
A high-resolution numerical model with idealized topography is used to investigate the degree to which a coastal upwelling jet separates from the shelf as it flows around a submarine bank depending on the wind strength and the horizontal scale of the bank. Experiments were run using several wind forcing magnitudes...
Surf zone eddies (f < 0.01 Hz) are important in nearshore mixing, shoreline erosion, the distribution of pollutants, and ecological processes, such as offshore transport of larvae. Surf zone eddies have traditionally been treated as two-dimensional features with horizontal length scales larger than the local water depth. Studies by Lippmann...
This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Inter-Research and can be found at: https://doi.org/10.3354/meps10835
Lagrangian particle-tracking models (LPTMs) were used to identify sources, destinations, and transport pathways of particles (plankton). The LPTM simulations were forced using stored fields from the Spectral Element Ocean Model simulation for a coastal upwelling system having idealized geometry, bathymetry, and simple wind forcing. Forward-in-time-trajectory (FITT) simulations are common in...
This is a case study of the cooperative development of an ocean condition forecasting tool by Oregon commercial fishermen, Oregon State University (OSU) scientists, and OSU student software engineers. Ocean condition forecasting models developed by OSU scientists were used to create an online tool to assist decision-making for fishermen. This...
Inner-shelf circulation and mechanisms of across-shelf transport of water masses were examined using seven years of observations collected by the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) program, a long-term monitoring effort along the central Oregon coast. Since 1998, moored velocity and hydrographic measurements have been obtained during the...