OCE-PRF Track 1 (Broadening Participation): Near-Inertial Oscillations on the West Florida Shelf in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico

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Near-Inertial Oscillations (NIO) in the coastal ocean may play a significant role in vertical mixing and horizontal dispersionof nutrients and particles in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, particularly on the West Florida Shelf (WFS). There is evidence that on the WFS the depth of the thermocline appears to migrate vertically over the course of a day, suggestive that a NIO mode structure may be modulating the thermocline depth and possibly affecting the distribution of biota across the thermocline, making the NIO potentially important to the coastal ocean ecology on the WFS. This award will support a Postdoctoral Fellow to investigate the dynamics of NIO on the WFS. The Fellow will work at the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida (USF-CMS) with the sponsorship of Dr. Robert H. Weisberg, and in the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at the Florida State University (FSU-COAPS) with the co-sponsorship of Dr. Dmitry Dukhovskoy.She will also mentor a summer undergraduate student through the Florida-Georgia Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LS-AMP) at FSU, develop a physical oceanography lab to add to a set of bio-geochemical labs for the Oceanography Camp for Girls and contribute physical oceanography questions for the Spoonbill Ocean Sciences Bowl.The PI will investigate the kinematics of NIO on the West Florida Shelf (WFS) with a full documentation of their spatial and temporal variations. This will be followed by a thorough investigation of the dynamics of the processes, particularly, how turbulence and bottom stress enter into the force balances and affect the conditions and mechanisms of generation of NIO in the region. Finally, the role of near-inertial motions in mixing on the WFS will be assessed.