From mid-May to August 2011, extreme runoff in the Columbia River ranged from 14,000 to over 17,000 m³/s, more than two standard deviations above the mean for this period. The extreme runoff was the direct result of both melting of anomalously high snowpack and rainfall associated with the 2010–2011 La Niña....
We investigated mesopredator effects on prey availability in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, assessing the reasons why Adélie penguin Pygoscelis adeliae foraging trip duration (FTD) increases and diet changes from krill to fish as numbers of foraging penguins and competing cetaceans increase in the penguins’ foraging area. To investigate penguins’ seasonally...
Lateral stirring is a basic oceanographic phenomenon affecting the distribution of physical, chemical, and biological fields. Eddy stirring at scales on the order of 100 km (the mesoscale) is fairly well understood and explicitly represented in modern eddy-resolving numerical models of global ocean circulation. The same cannot be said for...
Various ocean-climate models driven by increased greenhouse gases and higher temperatures predict a decline in oceanic dissolved oxygen (DO) as a result of greater stratification, reduced ventilation below the thermocline, and decreased solubility at higher temperatures. Since spreading of low oxygen waters is underway and predicted to increase, understanding impacts...
Two near-surface dye releases were mapped on scales of minutes to hours temporally, meters to
order 1 km horizontally, and 1–20 m vertically using a scanning, depth-resolving airborne lidar. In both cases,
dye evolved into a series of rolls with their major axes approximately aligned with the wind and/or
near-surface...
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)...
Climate models predict a decrease in oceanic dissolved oxygen and a thickening of the oxygen minimum zone, associated with global warming. Comprehensive observational analyses of oxygen decline are challenging, given generally sparse historical data. The Newport hydrographic (NH) line off central Oregon is one of the few locations in the...
Wind-driven coastal ocean upwelling supplies nutrients to the
euphotic zone near the coast. Nutrients fuel the growth of phytoplankton,
the base of a very productive coastal marine ecosystem
[Pauly D, Christensen V (1995) Nature 374:255–257]. Because
nutrient supply and phytoplankton biomass in shelf waters are
highly sensitive to variation in...
In the northern California Current, the onset of the 2005
upwelling season was five weeks later than usual, and well established
upwelling with a cold surface signature did not
occur until about seven weeks after this. As part of the joint
US-Canada Pacific hake survey, from 14–16 July 2005 we...
In 2005, the onset of spring conditions in the physics
of the coastal ocean (lowered sea level, spin-up of
vertically-sheared equatorward coastal jet) came about 50
days later than average off Newport Oregon, on May 24.
There was a further delay of 50 days before the subsurface
upwelled water penetrated...