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...
Realistic hindcast of the Columbia River estuarine-plume-shelf circulation in summer
2004 using the Regional Ocean Modeling System nested within the Navy Coastal Ocean
Model (NCOM) is quantitatively evaluated with an extensive set of observations. The
model has about equal skill at tidal and subtidal properties. Tidal circulation and water
properties...
The connectivity among straits of the northwest Pacific marginal seas is investigated with a primitive-equation ocean circulation model simulated for 10 years from 1994 to 2003. Over the simulation interval the temporal and spatial means and variations of the model sea surface temperature are comparable to those of the satellite...
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....
River Influences on Shelf Ecosystems (RISE) is the first comprehensive
interdisciplinary study of the rates and dynamics governing the mixing of river and coastal
waters in an eastern boundary current system, as well as the effects of the resultant plume
on phytoplankton standing stocks, growth and grazing rates, and community...
Large rivers represent gateways for the transport of
terrigenous and anthropogenic material to the coastal ocean.
Here we document a ∼700 km2 recirculation or bulge associated
with the Columbia River plume that retains recently discharged
river water sufficiently to create a regional bioreactor.
Fueled by a fluvial nitrate source, this...
Velocity time series are used to study cross-shelf circulation on the northern California shelf and to examine classical ideas of locally wind-forced cross-shelf circulation. A simple linear two-dimensional model of cross-shelf transport is compared to estimates of cross-shelf transport in the near surface, interior, and near bottom. In winter, when...
Objective streamfunction and velocity potential maps of three commonly observed flow states near Point Conception, California, are derived from moored current-meter and drifter observations. The states are defined using current-meter data. Drifter data are sorted by flow state and averaged within spatial bins to resolve their spatial structures. Spatial correlations...
Several simple laboratory experiments have been conducted to study the dynamic behavior of the vector-averaging current meter (VACM) compass and vane follower. They demonstrate that the behavior of the compass and vane follower can be modeled as a damped linear harmonic oscillator for small-amplitude forcing. The combined eddy-current and bearing-friction...