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,...
Equatorward velocities in the upwelling jet of the northern California Current were 0.05–0.06 m s¯¹ faster in spring and summer 2002 than on average over 1998–2002. This result is based on a five-year data set of surface drifters released across the continental margin off central Oregon (44.65°N) during April and...
We present velocity observations from a shipboard acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) on R/V Wecoma during cruise W0105c (23 May to 13 June 2001). The cruise was a component (Survey I) of the Coastal Ocean Advances in Shelf Transport (COAST) experiment. The ADCP was an RD Instruments hull-mounted 153.6-kHz narrowband...
Upwelling jets flow alongshore in approximate geostrophic balance with the onshore pressure gradient induced by coastal upwelling. Observations of such jets have shown that they often move offshore downstream of capes, leaving a pool of upwelled water inshore. Comparisons are made between this behavior and the hydraulic transition of a...
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...
As part of the Coastal Ocean Processes (CoOP) project Coastal Ocean Advances in Shelf Transport (COAST), this was the second of two cruises in 2001 to study cross-shelf transport processes in a wind-driven coastal ocean. The project includes field experiments off the Oregon coast and coordinated ocean circulation/ecosystem and atmospheric...
MicroSoar, an undulating profiler capable of measuring turbulence parameters such as Thorpe scales and thermal dissipation rate while being towed at speeds of up to 4 m s⁻¹, offers the possibility of obtaining a close-to-synoptic image of mixing over large spatial areas. In this paper, the method of calculating Thorpe...
Several diagnoses of three-dimensional circulation, using density and velocity data from a high-resolution, upper-ocean SeaSoar and acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) survey of a cyclonic jet meander and adjacent cyclonic eddy containing high Rossby number flow, are compared. The Q-vector form of the quasigeostrophic omega equation, two omega equations derived...
Recent work by S. Lentz et al. documents offshore transport in the inner shelf due to a wave-driven return
flow associated with the Hasselmann wave stress (the Stokes–Coriolis force). This analysis is extended using
observations from the central Oregon coast to identify the wave-driven return flow present and quantify the...
The event-scale variability of across-shelf transport was investigated using observations made in 15 m of
water on the central Oregon inner shelf. In a study area with intermittently upwelling-favorable winds and
significant density stratification, hydrographic and velocity observations show rapid across-shelf movement of
water masses over event time scales of...