Major disjunctions among marine communities in southeastern Australia have been well documented, although explanations for biogeographic structuring remain uncertain. Converging ocean currents, environmental gradients, and habitat discontinuities have been hypothesized as likely drivers of structuring in many species, although the extent to which species are affected appears largely dependent o...

[1] Spatial variations in the seasonal cycle of sea surface temperature (SST) are studied over the western North Pacific using a high-resolution climatology. In addition to monsoon, bathymetry and tidal mixing, western boundary currents and their extensions/branches are found to have a significant effect on the annual range of SST, with reduced values on the paths of warm currents and increased...

In the South Atlantic Ocean, few data exist regarding the dispersal of young oceanic sea turtles. We characterized the movements of laboratory-reared yearling loggerhead turtles from Brazilian rookeries using novel telemetry techniques, testing for differences in dispersal during different periods of the sea turtle hatching season that correspond to seasonal changes in ocean currents. Oceanogra...

D I R E C T measurement of large-scale ocean currents with current meter arrays is difficult and costly on basin scales. Since large-scale currents are very nearly in geostrophic balance, their velocity can be calculated from the pressure gradient on an equigeopotential surface. The surface geostrophic current therefore can be calculated from the deviation of sea level from the equigeopotential...

Establishing a persistent presence in the ocean with an AUV to observe temporal variability of large-scale ocean processes requires a unique sensor platform. In this paper, we propose a strategy that utilizes ocean model predictions to increase the autonomy and control of Lagrangian or profiling floats for precisely this purpose. An A* planner is applied to a local controllability map generated...

Underwater gliders are a class of AUVs designed for high endurance over long distances, but their reduced velocity makes them more susceptible to ocean currents during deployment. Thus, feasible paths need to be generated through the ocean current field. This paper proposes a method for determining energy-optimal paths that account for the influence of ocean currents. The proposed technique is ...

We investigated the impact of assimilating a mapped dataset of subsurface ocean currents into an ocean state estimation. We carried out two global ocean state estimations from 2000 to 2007 using the K7 four-dimensional variational data synthesis system, one of which included an additional map of climatological geostrophic currents estimated from the global set of Argo floats. We assessed the re...

We address the control of a vertically profiling float using ocean-model-based predictions of future currents. While these problems are in reality continuous control problems, we solve them by searching a discrete space of future actions. Additionally, while the environment is a continuous space, the ocean model we use is a discrete cell-based model. We show that even with an imperfect model of...

The optimum path to follow when subjected to cross flows was first considered over 80 years ago by the German mathematician Ernst Zermelo, in the context of a boat being displaced by ocean currents, and has become known as the 'Zermelo navigation problem'. However, the ability of migrating animals to solve this problem has received limited consideration, even though wind and ocean currents caus...

The regional waters in Singapore Strait are characterized by complex hydrodynamic phenomena as a result of the combined effect of three large water bodies viz. the South China Sea, the Andaman Sea, and the Java Sea. This leads to anomalies in water levels and generates residual currents. Numerical hydrodynamic models are generally used for predicting water levels in the ocean and seas. But thei...