Sea breezes are characteristic features of coastal regions that can extend large distances from the coastline. Oscillations close to the inertial period are thought to account for around half the kinetic energy in the global surface ocean and play an important role in mixing. In the vicinity of 301N/S, through a resonance between the diurnal and inertial frequencies, diurnal winds could force e...

The Sinc-Galerkin method is presented as a new and potentially useful extension of the spectral method in numerical oceanography. To describe and illustrate the technique , a Sinc-Galerkin procedure is used to infer the sensitivity of wind-driven subsur-face currents in coastal regions and semi-enclosed seas when the vertical eddy viscosity coeecient is represented as a continuously diierentiab...

In a stratified rotating fluid, frictionally driven circulations couple with the buoyancy field over sloping topography. Analytical and numerical methods are used to quantify the impact of this coupling on the vertical circulation, spindown of geostrophic flows, and the formation of a shelfbreak jet. Over a stratified. slope, linear spindown of a geostrophic along-isobath flow induces cross-iso...

Two subsurface Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP) were deployed in the northeastern South China Sea to study the circulation structure in the area as well as the path and process of the Kuroshio intrusion. The 48 h low-pass filtered data, for the first time, reveal significant intra-seasonal variations in the velocity field. Flow is alternately cyclonic or anticyclonic even within a sing...

Previous observational and modeling studies have indicated the importance of finescale winds in determining the circulation near Point Conception in the Santa Maria Basin (SMB) and the Santa Barbara Channel (SBC), California. There has not been a systematic attempt, however, to analyze and quantify the sensitivity of the near-surface circulation to different wind data. Here, a regional circulat...

A new model of surface drift currents is constructed using the full nonlinear equations of motion. This model includes the balance between Coriolis forces due to the mean and wave-induced motions and the surface wind stresses. The approach used in the analysis is similar to the work by Craik & Leibovich (1976) and Leibovich (1977), but the emphasis is on the mean motion rather than the small-sc...

[1] As part of an experiment to study wind-driven coastal circulation, 17 hydrographic surveys of the middle to inner shelf region off the coast of Newport, OR (44.65 N, from roughly the 90 m isobath to the 10 m isobath) were performed during Summer 1999 with a small, towed, undulating vehicle. The cross-shelf survey data were combined with data from several other surveys at the same latitude t...

2. Warm core systems are equivalently barotropic because the thickness and mass fields align as vertically-stacked structures. The resulting lack of thickness advection by the geostrophic wind prevents any conversion of zonal available potential energy (PM) to eddy available potential energy (PE) by the geostrophic wind thus precluding any quasigeostrophic baroclinic instability for warm core s...

It is shown that when the wind distribution along a coast is anisotropic, such that its cross-shore scale is smaller than its alongshore scale, the coastal sea level (or the upper layer anamoly) “A” of an ocean forced by both wind and wind curl is governed by a modified (nondimensionalized) Kelvin wave equation: ­A/­t* 1 ­A/­ y* 5 k0(0, y*, t*) 1 * ­k1/­ y* dtL where k0 and k1 are wind stress a...

Six metrics characterize annual aspects of the magnitude and timing of shellfish toxicity resulting from dinoflagellates of the genus Alexandrium at >100 monitoring stations over 21 years (1985–2005) along the coast of Maine, northeastern USA. Climatologies at each station show distinct geographic patterns, generally consistent with previous reports based fewer stations/years. Earliest initiati...