ATOC 5051, Fall 2007 — Notes & Calendar

ATOC 5051: Introduction to Physical Oceanography

Or, Notions for the Motions of the Oceans. This is a core course for graduate students covering the basic tools needed for oceanography. Observational, dynamical, numerical, and descriptive methods are discussed and used to get a sense of the historical and contemporary understanding of the motions of the oceans.

You can access the syllabus, proceedings, class notes, and class files.

ATOC 5051

Introduction to Physical Oceanography, 2007

Assignment 4: Round and Round

Download a wind stress dataset from ECCO or COADS, etc. There are some wind files that I have pre-processed here. They are derived from the:
Grist & Josey climatology,
The ECCO data-assimilating model iteration 199,
The Hellerman & Rosenstein Climatology, and
The NSCAT scatterometer data.
I have given you the wind stresses and wind stress curls (Note for Posterity, there was an error in the original curl calculations). Calculate the Ekman transports and the Ekman Divergence. What features are revealed? How do datasets differ by month/year/across datasets? You may want to check out this paper!