The oceans cover two thirds of the world’s surface and act as a reservoir to store heat. They are forced at planetary scales on the order of 1,000,000 metres (examples are heating by the sun and tides generated by the moon) but the dissipation occurs at scales of 0.000001 metres. In this vast range of length scales there are many interesting dynamical processes that contribute to the transfer of energy down from the planetary scales to the micro-scales. Understanding all of these together is an impossible task even with the world’s most powerful computers. However, we can do idealized process studies to unravel some of nature’s secrets and then piece together the different components to better comprehend what occurs in the oceans. These scientific questions are of great interest in their own right but also play an important role in understanding the ocean’s role in climate and in general how it exchanges properties with the atmosphere.
News
Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award
Melanie Chanona was awarded the Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial award for undergraduate research upon graduating from Mathematical Physics. In September, Melanie will start her graduate studies in Physical Oceanography with Prof. Stephanie Waterman at UBC.
Paper accepted
The following paper was accepted and appeared in the May issue of the journal.
Bembenek, E., Poulin, F.J. and Waite, M.L., (2015), Realizing surface driven flows in the primitive equations, J. Phys. Oceanogr., 45, 1376–1392.
CMOS Conference
At the 49th CMOS Congress and 13th AMS Conference o Polar Meteorology and Oceanography Prof Poulin presented the following:
"A study of a surface trapped elliptical anticyclone at finite Rossby Number" (talk)
"The occurrance of Yanai waves in constrained geometries" (poster)