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...
The Office of Naval Research's Coupled Boundary Layers and Air–Sea Transfer (CBLAST) program is being conducted to investigate the processes that couple the marine boundary layers and govern the exchange of heat, mass, and momentum across the air–sea interface. CBLAST-LOW was designed to investigate these processes at the low-wind extreme...
The state of the California Current system (CCS) since spring 2010 has evolved in response to the development of cooler La Nina following the dissipation of the relatively weak and short-lived El Nino event of 2009-2010. The 2009-2010 El Nino appears to have dissipated quite rapidly in early spring 2010,...
Cloud radars at X, Ka and W-bands have been used in the past for ocean studies of clouds, but the lack of suitable stabilization has limited their usefulness in obtaining accurate measurements of the velocity structure of cloud particles and the heights of cloud features. A 94 GHz (W-band) radar...
Accurately simulating gross primary productivity (GPP) in terrestrial ecosystem models is critical because errors in simulated GPP propagate through the model to introduce additional errors in simulated biomass and other fluxes. We evaluated simulated, daily average GPP from 26 models against estimated GPP at 39 eddy covariance flux tower sites...
Well-functioning food webs are fundamental for sustaining rivers as ecosystems and maintaining associated aquatic and terrestrial communities. The current emphasis on restoring habitat structure-without explicitly considering food webs-has been less successful than hoped in terms of enhancing the status of targeted species and often overlooks important constraints on ecologically effective...
The European green crab (Carcinus maenas) has persisted in Oregon and Washington coastal estuaries since the late 1990’s. After the arrival of a strong year class in 1998, significant recruitment to the populations occurred only in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2016. Warm winter water temperatures, high Pacific Decadal...
Ecological niche theory holds that species distributions are shaped by a large and complex suite of interacting factors. Species distribution models (SDMs) are increasingly used to describe species’ niches and predict the effects of future environmental change, including climate change. Currently, SDMs often fail to capture the complexity of species’...
Background: Having conquered water surfaces worldwide, the semi-aquatic bugs occupy ponds, streams, lakes, mangroves, and even open oceans. The diversity of this group has inspired a range of scientific studies from ecology and evolution to developmental genetics and hydrodynamics of fluid locomotion. However, the lack of a representative water strider...