Data from an array of bottom pressure gauges and a string of current meters in the vicinity of 47°N,
139°W, are used to examine the deep-ocean variability forced by ocean surface wind stress curl from
August 1987 to June 1988. Bottom geostrophic currents are computed from the pressure gauge array,...
Extreme water levels generating flooding in estuarine and coastal environments are often driven by compound events, where many individual processes such as waves, storm surge, streamflow, and tides coincide. Despite this, extreme water levels are typically modeled in isolated open-coast or estuarine environments, potentially mischaracterizing the true risk of flooding...
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was considerable interest in near-equatorial variability at periods of days to weeks associated with oceanic equatorial inertia–gravity waves and mixed Rossby–gravity waves. At that time, the measurements available for studying these waves were much more limited than today: most of the available observations were...
The vertical propagation of Coastal Trapped Waves (CTWs) due to subsurface ridges is explored with the help of linear numerical and analytical models. Results show that submerged ridges projecting from the shoreline can scatter a horizontally propagating single baroclinic mode Kelvin wave into both upward and downward propagating Kelvin wave...
We investigated sea level fluctuations at seven locations from San Francisco to Torino, British
Columbia, during a 2-year period beginning in August 1973. Using overlapping 2-month periods, we
found the alongshore correlation to vary with time and with location along the coast. In winter the
fluctuatioans are correlated along the...
During boreal summer and fall, there is a strong southerly boundary layer flow across the equator into the east Pacific intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). The modulation of this flow on synoptic to seasonal time scales is studied using an index of meridional pressure difference between the equator and the ITCZ...
Turbulent mixing of salt is examined in a shallow salt wedge estuary with strong fluvial and tidal forcing. A numerical model of the Merrimack River estuary is used to quantify turbulent stress, shear production, and buoyancy flux. Little mixing occurs during flood tides despite strong velocities because bottom boundary layer...
Pacific Water flows across the shallow Chukchi Sea before reaching the Arctic Ocean, where it is a source of heat, freshwater, nutrients, and carbon. A substantial portion of Pacific Water is routed through Barrow Canyon, located in the northeast corner of the Chukchi. Barrow Canyon is a region of complex...
A series of observing system simulation experiments (OSSE) is performed on a simulated data
set which was designed to mimic the wind-forced response of the tropical Pacific ocean. This
data set was constructed by adding random perturbations to the FSU monthly mean pseudostress
anomaly data. These perturbed pseudostress anomaly fields...
While bubble plumes have been acoustically imaged in the water column above marine gas
hydrate deposits in many studies, little is known about the temporal variation in plume intensity. In
July 2008, we conducted surveys using 3.5 and 12 kHz echosounders and a 75 kHz acoustic Doppler
current profiler (ADCP)...
Small rivers, such as those that line the Oregon coast, have been shown to deliver significant concentrations of suspended sediments and nutrients to estuaries and the coastal ocean during wet seasons during which winds are predominantly downwelling-favorable. The fate of the buoyant source water and of any suspended or dissolved...
The sea as a dynamic conducting medium interacts continually
with the earth' s magnetic field. The physical principles underlying
this interaction are reviewed. These results are applied to the
particular problem of towed electrodes at the sea surface. Data
using this method are then shown to be sensitive to stability...
The loss of Arctic sea ice has emerged as a leading signal of global warming. This, together with acknowledged impacts on other components of the Earth system, has led to the term “the new Arctic.” Global coupled climate models predict that ice loss will continue through the twenty-first century, with...
Recent turbulence measurements over a small bank on the continental shelf off Oregon reveal a previously undetected site for intense mixing of the coastal ocean. The flow is hydraulically controlled and turbulence diffusivities over the bank are more than 100 times greater than estimates made on the shelf away from...
Altimetric data from the TOPEX/POSEIDON mission will be used for studies of global ocean circulation and marine geophysics. However, it is first necessary to remove the ocean tides, which are aliased in the raw data. The tides are constrained by two distinct types of information: the hydrodynamic equations which the...
The interaction of the dominant semidiurnal M₂ internal tide with the large-scale subtidal flow is examined
in an ocean model by propagating the tide through an ensemble of background fields in a domain centered on
the Hawaiian Ridge. The background fields are taken from the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA)...
During summer 2001, high-resolution hydrographic, velocity, and bio-optical surveys
were conducted over Heceta Bank off central Oregon. North of the bank, upwelling
over simple bottom topography exhibited a classic response with a midshelf, baroclinic
coastal jet and upwelled isopycnals. The coastal upwelling jet follows the bank
topography as it widens...
Tide-topography coupling is important for understanding surface-tide energy loss, the intermittency of internal tides, and the cascade of internal-tide energy from large to small scales. Although tide-topography coupling has been observed and modeled for 50 years, the identification of surface and internal tides over arbitrary topography has not been standardized....
Tidal mixing over a slope was explored using moored time series observations on Kaena Ridge extending northwest from Oahu, Hawaii, during the Survey component of the Hawaii Ocean Mixing Experiment (HOME). A mooring was instrumented to sample the velocity and density field of the lower 500 m of the water...
In situ observations of tidally driven turbulence were obtained in a small channel that transects the crest of the Mendocino Ridge, a site of mixed (diurnal and semidiurnal) tides. Diurnal tides are subinertial at this latitude, and once per day a trapped tide leads to large flows through the channel...
Analogous to ocean surface waves, waves in the ocean interior also experience steepening, breaking, and dissipation as they approach the coastline. Much less is known about this internal beach. In this work, extensive moored Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler and temperature/salinity data together with optical remote sensing are combined to describe...
Throughout the Holocene, appreciable changes in bathymetry are hypothesized to have resulted in large changes to tidal datums in coastal and estuarine areas. An understanding of tidal change is an important contribution to the knowledge of relative historical sea-level change and future coastal planning. To test this hypothesis, the Advanced...
Abstract— A highly idealized model of an ocean-fjord system, in which the tide is forced astronomically by the gravitational force of the moon, is used to study effects of localized tidal energy extraction on regional and global tides. The modeled system is energetically complete in the sense that the model...
Measurements of tidal currents on the central Oregon shelf are available from several sources, including recent high frequency (HF) coastal radar and Acoustic Doppler Profiler (ADP) deployments, and historical current moorings. In this paper we use a generalized inverse (GI) approach to compare these data to, and then assimilate them...
The response of tidal and residual currents to small scale morphological differences over abrupt
deep sea topography (Seine Seamount) was estimated for bathymetry grids of different spatial
resolution. Local barotropic tidal model solutions were obtained for three popular and publicly
available bathymetry grids (Smith and Sandwell TOPO8.2, ETOPO1 and GEBCO08)...
The three-dimensional (3D) double-ridge internal tide interference in the Luzon Strait in the South China
Sea is examined by comparing 3D and two-dimensional (2D) realistic simulations. Both the 3D simulations
and observations indicate the presence of 3D first-mode (semi)diurnal standing waves in the 3.6-km-deep
trench in the strait. As in...
The northern California Current System is impacted by two primary freshwater
sources: the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Columbia River. The Columbia is frequently
bidirectional in summer, with branches both north and south of the river mouth
simultaneously. We describe the interaction of these two warm Columbia plumes...
Application of the ²³⁰Th normalization method to estimate sediment burial fluxes in six cores from the
eastern equatorial Pacific (EEP) reveals that bulk sediment and organic carbon fluxes display a coherent regional
pattern during the Holocene that is consistent with modern oceanographic conditions, in contrast with estimates
of bulk mass...
It is well known that numerical simulations of freshwater discharges produce plumes that spread in the
direction opposite to that of the propagation of coastally trapped waves (the upstream direction). The lack of
a theory explaining these motions in unforced environments deemed the numerical results suspect. Thus, it
became a...
Packets of nonlinear internal waves (NLIWs) in a small area of the Mid-Atlantic Bight were 10 times more energetic during a local neap tide than during the preceding spring tide. This counterintuitive result cannot be explained if the waves are generated near the shelf break by the local barotropic tide...
The time-averaged velocity field in the North Pacific was estimated in two
sets of inverse calculations. The planetary geostrophic equations were the basis for
dynamical models of the flow in each case. The inverse estimates of the circulation
were obtained by minimizing a positive-definite cost function, which measured the
inconsistency...
Current meter moorings maintained over the Oregon continental shelf in 1973 and 1975 clearly show the difference between winter and spring oceanographic regimes and the rapid transition between the regimes. In winter the mean alongshore current is northward at all depths and strongest near shore; there is no mean vertical...
Turbulence controls the composition of river plumes through mixing and alters the plume's trajectory by diffusing its momentum. While believed to play a crucial role in decelerating river-source waters, the turbulence stress in a near-field river plume has not previously been observationally quantified. In this study, finely resolved density, velocity,...
A linearized baroclinic, spectral-in-time tidal inverse model has been developed for assimilation of surface currents from coast-based high-frequency (HF) radars. Representer functions obtained as a part of the generalized inverse solution show that for superinertial flows information from the surface velocity measurements propagates to depth along wave characteristics, allowing internal...
The Inverse Ocean Modeling (IOM) System is a modular system for constructing and running weak-constraint four-dimensional variational data assimilation (W4DVAR) for any linear or nonlinear functionally smooth dynamical model and observing array. The IOM has been applied to four ocean models with widely varying characteristics. The Primitive Equations Z-coordinate-Harmonic Analysis...
A 2 week field experiment investigated the hydrodynamics of a strongly tidally forced tropical intertidal reef platform in the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia, where the spring tidal range exceeds 8 m. At this site, the flat and wide (∼1.4 km) reef platform is located slightly above mean sea level,...
In most estuarine systems it is assumed that the dominant along-channel momentum balance is between the integrated pressure gradient and bed stress. Scaling the amplitude of the estuarine circulation based on this balance has been shown to have predictive skill. However, a number of authors recently highlighted important nonlinear processes...
This study shows that simulations of bottom-trapped plumes in periodic or closed domains generate a spurious cyclonic current that arrests the natural tendency of the plume to move upstream. Furthermore, it also shows that attempts to obstruct the upstream spreading lead to a bias of the fundamental characteristics of the...
The small S₁ ocean tide is caused primarily by diurnal atmospheric pressure loading. Its excitation is therefore unlike any other diurnal tide; in particular, pressure loading is maximum near the equator where the diurnal gravitational potential is zero. The global character of the S₁ tide is here determined by numerical...
Hydrographic observations made with an undulating vehicle carrying a CTD and concurrent shipboard ADCP velocity observations over a 12‐day period are combined to investigate vertical mixing and cross‐frontal fluxes on the Northern Flank of Georges Bank. The CTD density time series is analyzed to detect the presence of vertical overturns,...
During March–April 1999, 2 weeks of undulating CTD and shipboard acoustic
Doppler current profiler surveys revealed the variability of the intense internal tide on the
northern edge of Georges Bank. The nature of the internal tide was modulated by episodic
surface intrusions of cool, fresh Scotian Shelf Water (SSW), stratifying...
Internal gravity waves, the subsurface analogue of the familiar
surface gravity waves that break on beaches, are ubiquitous in
the ocean. Because of their strong vertical and horizontal currents,
and the turbulent mixing caused by their breaking, they affect a
panoply of ocean processes, such as the supply of nutrients...
How and where the ocean tides dissipate
their energy are longstanding questions with both
oceanographic and astronomical implications. Two
decades ago, Doake suggested that flexing of Antarctic
ice shelves by the underlying ocean tide is an important
energy sink, perhaps accounting for over half the global
dissipation rate. Observational constraints...
Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance and, hence, sea level change is affected by the floating extensions of outlet glaciers and ice streams that take up about 44% of the coastline (Drewry et al., 1982) and are referred to as "ice shelves". Ice sheet mass loss accelerates when these ice shelves...
Climate change impacts on extreme water levels (WLs) at two United States Pacific Northwest estuaries are investigated using a multicomponent process-based modeling framework. The integrated impact of climate change on estuarine forcing is considered using a series of sub-models that track changes to oceanic, atmospheric, and hydrologic controls on hydrodynamics....
Freshwater provided from river discharge influences the dynamics and circulation of most continental shelves around the world. It has profound effects on the transport and fate of materials and substances originated from rivers and estuaries, as well as on the ocean biogeochemistry and marine ecosystems. The effect of buoyancy forcing...