Coastal mixing and transport

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It is crucial to understand small-scale mixing in the ocean.  Mixing transports heat, nutrients, and contaminants through the water column, impacting the climate, biological productivity, and the health of our coastal ecosystems.  It also drives estuarine circulation, coastal upwelling, and even the global overturning circulation.  Despite acting on "small scales", mixing impacts the circulation of the ocean at all scales.       The work proposed here will make measurements of small-scale phenomena to understand and predict mixing in the ocean.  We will focus on coastal waters where new mixing mechanisms are still being discovered and still not included in numerical models.  We have identified four areas of great topical interest to concentrate on in this proposal: - the role of turbulence in determining the circulation and transport of properties on continental shelves; - how waters are transported from the surface mixing layer to the water directly beneath; - closing the tidal-energy budget in Knight Inlet, and understanding how the energy produces mixing; - understanding the generation and fate of Haida Eddies in the Gulf of Alaska.       Our group will use unique instrumentation to study these processes.  Small-scale turbulence will be investigated with microstructure instruments, while larger-scale forcing will be observed with a fast undulating vehicle.  Modern communications makes longer time-scale monitoring possible with profiling floats and autonomous gliders, so we will employ these to gather multi-season statistics of mixing.  These projects will involve extensive collaboration with scientists at University of Victoria, Institute of Ocean Sciences, University of Washington, Oregon State University, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  They will also provide extensive opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to participate in leading-edge oceanographic studies.