Seismic ocaenography (Collaborators: Mladen Nedimovic, Blair Greenan, Barry Ruddick, Keith Louden)

• Seismic oceanography is an emerging field within oceanography and geophysics. Seismic reflections in the water column were correlated with temperature contrasts in the ocean a few years ago, and now there is an effort to derive quantitative knowledge of the ocean from seismic imagery. I recently joined a team working on the Reflection Ocean Seismic Experiment (or ROSE), and am working with a suite of seismic and hydrographic data in an effort to characterize the seismic signatures of frontal features in a Gulf Stream meander.

Internal beach dynamics (Collaborators: Dan Kelley, Daniel Bourgault, Marina Blokhina)

• When an internal solitary wave encounters a sloping boundary, components of the wave energy can be diverted to breaking, along-slope currents, or the bottom itself. These processes can shear the wave or change the ambient stratification, both of which further complicate the problem. Grasping the dynamics that occur at ocean boundaries may be a key to understanding coastal ocean mixing, tidal energy dissipation, and possibly sedimentation.
  
  I am currently involved in the SLEIWEX project as well another field project on the Scotian Slope. Both studies examine internal solitary wave and solibore behaviour when such features encounter sloped topogrpahy. The figure below is a snapshot from a numerical model run showing the fate of a single large amplitude solitary wave as it encounters a sloped bottom.

Shelf-slope mass exchange (Collaborators: Susan Allen)

• Regional and global ocean models often have grid scales that are too large to resolve details at the shelfbreak, and mesoscale dynamics are often not represented. Boundary conditions at the shelfbreak - which can be viewed as the boundary conditions for the deep ocean - are often treated as homogeneous, despite the high variability at this location.
  
  My master's thesis used a laboratory model to examine advection-driven upwelling in a submarine canyon. The figure below compares upwelling in Astoria Canyon (off the mouth of the Columbia River, in Washington State) inferred from laboratory results to the wind-driven upwelling predicted by a simple Ekman model.

Mapping the thermocline and its variability

• The thermocline in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean heaves up and down on scales of weeks, months, and years. It is an important indicator for global climate, and also an importnat ecological boundary. My interest stems primarily from the latter. Before starting my PhD, I worked at the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Center, where I interacted with fisheries biologists and ecologists. Ecologists and fisheries oceanographers turn increasingly towards models of the ocean environment to help describe the behaviour of fish and marine mammals. Understanding the environment is a key to successful the management of commercial fisheries, for example. I have started examining variability of the thermocline in the Equatorial Pacific with the motivation of creating a tool that will help predict the thermocline variability on scales that are relevant to the Pacific longline fishery.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle