Small-scale processes in the ocean

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The coastal ocean is the most visible part of the ocean to most people's "naked eye", and it is arguably the most important part of the ocean for most of humanity. Its features and behaviors are controlled by a variety of physical processes at small-to-medium scale (meters to tens of kilometers), including surface, internal, and edge waves, fronts, turbulent eddies, double-diffusive layering, river plumes, and estuarine circulations, and thus understanding these processes is not only interesting scientifically, it is also critical for societal needs. Physical oceanographers over the years have been very successful in understanding many aspects of these ocean circulation processes. However, when faced with what may seem to be pretty straightforward questions about the coastal ocean such as "what parts of the Salish Sea are at risk from oil spills", or "what is the likelihood that sewage-derived norovirus contamination in the northern Strait of Georgia may be linked to Metro Vancouver sewage outfalls", or "where did those human feet washed up on beaches come from", we are mostly reduced to saying "I don't know". One contributing factor to this problem is that the standard tools of oceanography are mostly not well suited to provide answers to this type of question. These questions often take the form of "where does stuff go" in the ocean (a "Lagrangian" viewpoint), whereas most oceanographers are trying to answer questions of the form of  "what's happening right here"  (an "Eulerian" viewpoint), because that's how we make most of our measurements. I believe that a different observational strategy, based on "following where stuff goes", is worth developing in order to directly formulate and address basic scientific questions whose answers may then be more aligned with societal needs. These observations should be gathered from large numbers of sensors, so we can look at the range of possible outcomes, which in turn means they should be cheap (so the cost-of-entry to using them is low; it would be great if others could use them too). Thus, I am proposing to develop cheap Lagrangian sensors, and use them in large numbers to address different scientific problems related to small-scale processes in the coastal ocean.