 The SUSTAIN lab made the journey to the Left Coast in the beginning of June to participate in a series of field operations in Monterey Bay alongside the Naval Research Lab Monterey, the Naval Postgraduate School, and with technical support from the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory. Other than enjoying the rejuvenating power of a Central California summer, the goal of this field work was to collect data that can be used for validating a high resolution weather forecasts. The project, Coastal Land Air-Sea Interaction (CLASI), is aimed at examining how well these models do along the coastal margins and Monterey Bay is well-suited for being a test area. We used two research vessels to make observations in the bay, the R/V John Martin of the Moss Landing Marine Lab (the white ship in the foreground) and a RHIB (background, orange pontoons) on loan from the Naval Postgraduate School. The ship measurements were complimented by an array of shore stations (panorama below) deployed by the Postgraduate School. It was a fun time in Monterey Bay working with a great crew of researchers and I can't wait for our next foray.   Scum lines radiating from Pt. Pinos (southern edge of Monterey Bay). There was a strong southerly surge coming into the bay originating from down near St. Luis Obispo.  Beautiful California day up by Santa Cruz. Also, a nice example of short wave suppression by the kelp forest canopy. We are looking west, and a few kilometers further along the coast the wind was 20-30 knts with 3-4 foot wind waves. Pretty pleasant here though.
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The 7th International Symposium on Gas Transfer at Water Surfaces proceedings have been published, the link to my contribution is here: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/35/1/012008
Thank you to the organizers and to UW-APL for hosting an excellent symposium, it was a great experience. Advances in Understanding the Physical Processes at the Air-Sea Interface I
https://agu.confex.com/agu/os16/meetingapp.cgi/Session/11290 Advances in Understanding the Physical Processes at the Air-Sea Interface II https://agu.confex.com/agu/os16/meetingapp.cgi/Session/11291 Advances in Understanding the Physical Processes at the Air-Sea Interface III (Posters) https://agu.confex.com/agu/os16/meetingapp.cgi/Session/9953 Thanks to everyone who submitted to the session, I hope it will spark many stimulating discussions. This video was made for presentation at the IEEE/OES CWTM 2015 workshop. We have other videos available on our lab's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoc92v3aluKRgGDY3SkUPcw
 Abstract Coastal waters are an aerodynamically unique environment that has been little explored from an air-sea interaction point of view. Consequently, most studies must assume that open ocean-derived parameterizations of the air-sea momentum flux are representative of the nearshore wind forcing. Observations made at the New River Inlet in North Carolina, during the Riverine and Estuarine Transport experiment (RIVET), were used to evaluate the suitability of wind speed-dependent, wind stress parameterizations in coastal waters. As part of the field campaign, a small, agile research vessel was deployed to make high-resolution wind velocity measurements in and around the tidal inlet. The eddy covariance method was employed to recover direct estimates of the 10 m neutral atmospheric drag coefficient from the three-dimensional winds. Observations of wind stress angle, near-surface currents, and heat flux were used to analyze the cross-shore variability of wind stress steering off the mean wind azimuth. In general, for onshore winds above 5 m/s, the drag coefficient was observed to be two and a half times the predicted open ocean value. Significant wind stress steering is observed within 2 km of the inlet mouth, which is observed to be correlated with the horizontal current shear. Other mechanisms such as the reduction in wave celerity or depth-limited breaking could also play a role. It was determined that outside the influence of these typical coastal processes, the open ocean parameterizations generally represent the wind stress field. The nearshore stress variability has significant implications for observations and simulations of coastal transport, circulation, mixing, and general surf-zone dynamics.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JC010412/abstract
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