Ocean physics is of fundamental importance to our understanding of the environment and its dynamical behavior. In particular, global change and global warming are strongly affected by the oceans and their currents. My work focuses on the movement of fluids within the ocean and its relationship to the interaction with the atmosphere above. I use observations, mathematical methods, and imagination in order to achieve an understanding of these processes. Recent efforts have addressed oceanic processes in the South Atlantic, the Sea of Japan, the Red Sea, the western equatorial Pacific, and the Indonesian passages.
Students will be encouraged to choose processes according to their particular interests, use advanced computation techniques, achieve a thorough understanding of the choosen processes and develop their own style of addressing problems. Our research is supported mainly by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
Locations representing recent work are marked in the map below:
An example of a recent research problem is that of eddies generated by a subcritical bottom slope (see movie below). Upstream the bottom has a strong enough slope to sustain a continuous unbroken current (i.e., the slope is supercritical). In the region between 0 and 200 kilometers the slope is reduced to a subcritical value so the current can only exist there as a chain of eddies. Farther downstream the slope returns to the high supercritical upstream values so the eddies merge and form a continuous current similar to the upstream flow. This may take a minute to load.
Thanks for visiting our site, please explore our research, and if you can not find what you need here, find our contact information here.
Ocean physics is of fundamental importance to our understanding of the environment and its dynamical behavior. In particular, global 
Red Sea, the western equatorial Pacific, and the Indonesian passages.
