Small-scale processes in the ocean

沿海海洋是海洋中大多数人“肉眼”最容易看到的部分，对大多数人类来说，它可以说是海洋中最重要的部分。它的特征和行为受到多种中小尺度（米到几十公里）物理过程的控制，包括表面、内部和边缘波、锋面、湍流涡流、双扩散分层、河流羽流和河口环流，因此了解这些过程不仅具有科学意义，而且对社会需求也至关重要。多年来，物理海洋学家在理解这些海洋环流过程的许多方面非常成功。然而，当面对一些看似相当简单的关于沿海海洋的问题时，比如“萨利希海的哪些部分面临石油泄漏的风险”，或者“格鲁吉亚海峡北部污水来源的诺如病毒污染可能与大温哥华地区的污水排放有关的可能性有多大”，或者“那些被冲到海滩上的人的脚来自哪里”，我们大多会说“我不知道”。造成这一问题的一个因素是，海洋学的标准工具大多不适合为这类问题提供答案。这些问题通常以“海洋里的东西去哪儿了”（“拉格朗日”观点）的形式出现，而大多数海洋学家则试图回答“这里发生了什么”（“欧拉”观点）的形式出现的问题，因为这是我们进行大多数测量的方式。我相信，一种基于“跟随事物走向”的不同观察策略值得发展，以便直接制定和解决基本科学问题，这些问题的答案可能会更符合社会需求。这些观察结果应该从大量的传感器中收集，这样我们就可以看到可能的结果范围，这反过来意味着它们应该便宜（因此使用它们的入门成本很低；如果其他人也能使用它们，那就太好了）。因此，我建议开发廉价的拉格朗日传感器，并大量使用它们来解决与沿海海洋中小规模过程相关的不同科学问题。

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.