As the individual reports illustrate, the Physical Oceanography Group continues to maintain a productive balance between basic and targeted research. At Dalhousie, as elsewhere, this balance requires active participation in large, collaborative programs as well as in smaller, more individual, projects. The large programs such as CLIVAR and GLOBEC provide important exposure at the national and international level in addition to providing a major source of funding for summer and Co-op students, research assistants and postdoctoral fellows. Additional support for infrastructure has been through the Canada Foundation for Innovation, providing significant awards for new faculty as well as major projects. Notable was the award from CFI in support of the infrastructure for the Centre for Marine Environmental Prediction (CMEP). This brings together both physical oceanographers and colleagues from the other disciplines to deploy ocean observing systems, the first being planned for Lunenburg Bay, Nova Scotia. The aim is to combine long term measurements, numerical models, and data assimilation techniques to analyse, and predict, the behaviour of the ocean on a whole suite of timescales, which include real time estimates of the current state of the ocean environment (nowcasts) and predictions of future state of the ocean analogous to the weather and climate predictions that are made for the atmosphere.
This project is one facet of the continuing evolution of a major modeling component in the Department. This is focused by the research activities of Richard Greatbatch, Jinyu Sheng, and Keith Thompson working in conjunction with our Adjunct Professors, Hal Ritchie (AEPRI/MSC) and Dan Wright (BIO), and MARTEC, one of the sponsors of our industrial research chairs.
To complement our involvement in the big programs, we continue to undertake more free-wheeling research, especially to give flexibility to student projects. Current research interests include not only ocean climate, ocean and shelf circulation, but also topics such as sediment transport, ocean acoustics, shear waves on beaches, deep convection and thermohaline circulation, double-diffusive mixing and cross-frontal intrusions, bottom boundary layer mixing, mixing by Lagrangian chaos in tidally stirred flows, and atmospheric modelling and dynamics. This short list gives a taste of the many interesting research opportunities for student and postdoctoral work in the group; more details are given in the following sections.
As usual, a number of visitors added new dimensions to the group's activities and discussions. Dr. David Hebert (URI) spent a sabbatical year with the group, September 1999 - August 2000, collaborating on laboratory experiments on differential mixing with Barry Ruddick and on bottom boundary layer mixing with Dan Kelley. Yi Cai, from the National Research Center for Marine Environmental Forecasts in Beijing China, visited the department from September 1999 to October 2000 working with Richard Greatbatch and Youyu Lu on a new, non-Boussinesq ocean model formulation.
Two students registered at Memorial University came with Alex Hay to complete their doctoral theses while resident in the Department. Amani Ngusaru (B.Sc. University of Dar-es-Salaam, M.Sc. Dalhousie University) successfully defended his doctoral thesis in November 1999, and has returned to Tanzania to take up a faculty position at the University of Dar-es-Salaam.
Anna Crawford (B.Sc. Dalhousie University, M.Sc. Memorial University) successfully defended her doctoral thesis in February, 2000, and is now working as a Defense Scientist at DREA.
We warmly acknowledge the many people at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography and the Meteorological Service of Canada, with whom we interact and collaborate. The list of adjunct faculty gives some indication of the scope of this interaction. The assistance of these and other members of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Meteorological Service of Canada in graduate student supervision, in generously providing observational data to help our studies, and in keeping the seminars lively, is always appreciated.
A further acknowledgement is again due to the technical staff, whose contributions have been increasingly vital over the years. David Jackson has been the essential systems analyst and Walter Judge is our electronics technologist. Ocean acoustics staff Wes Paul and Todd Mudge provide assistance to the whole group from time to time. Ocean modeling computer specialist Mike Casey can also be relied on to assist the group when necessary. Jackie Hurst remains the central point around whom all things revolve.