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...
Meteorological conditions during an intensive oceanographic observational program
in May through August 2001 along the central Oregon coast are described and related to
larger-scale and longer-term conditions. Southward wind stresses of 0.05-0.1 N m⁻²
occurred roughly 75% of the time, with a sustained period of dominantly southward stress
from mid-June...
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...
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...
The study analyzes atmospheric circulation around an idealized coastal cape during summertime upwelling-favorable wind conditions simulated by a mesoscale coupled ocean–atmosphere model. The domain resembles an eastern ocean boundary with a single cape protruding into the ocean in the center of a coastline. The model predicts the formation of an...
Coastally trapped wind reversals along the U.S. west coast, which are often accompanied by a northward surge of fog or stratus, are an important warm—season forecast problem due to their impact on coastal maritime activities and airport operations. Previous studies identified several possible dynamic mechanisms that could be responsible for...
An analytical model of subtropical mode water is presented, based on ventilated thermocline
theory and on numerical solutions of a planetary geostrophic basin model. In ventilated
thermocline theory, the western pool is a region bounded on the east by subsurface
streamlines that outcrop at the western edge of the interior,...
The dynamical response of the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL) to mesoscale sea surface temperature (SST) perturbations is investigated over the Agulhas Return Current during winter from a 1-month, high-resolution, three-dimensional simulation using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale model. A steady lower boundary condition for July 2002 is...
Satellite observations of ice motion are combined with model estimates of low‐level winds and surface wind stress to provide evidence for atmospheric control of sea‐ice motion through Nares Strait, between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, during two periods in 2004. The results suggest that ice flux through the strait, and its...
Ten years of sea-surface height (SSH) fields constructed from the merged TOPEX/Poseidon (T/P) and ERS-1/2 altimeter datasets are analyzed to investigate mesoscale variability in the global ocean. The higher resolution of the merged dataset reveals that more than 50% of the variability over much of the World Ocean is accounted...