ATOC 5051, Fall 2008

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.

Web Resources and Texts

Course Specific

1. Paper writing guidelines.
2. Peer reviewing guidelines.
3. Reading assignment guidelines.
4. Matlab guidelines.
5. ECCO guidelines.
6. AGU/GRL Article Length Tool
   This is an automated article length calculator for AGU. All assignments for this class must pass the GRL length calculation.

Textbooks and Papers

1. Robert H. Stewart's Introduction to Physical Oceanography
   Web-distributed basic but comprehensive textbook.
2. Tomczak and Godfrey's Regional Oceanography: An Introduction
   Tomczak and Godfrey's nice textbook.
3. Cushman-Roisin's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
   Chapters 5, 8, 12.
4. Cushman-Roisin and Beckers's Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics.
5. Emery, Talley, and Pickard's Descriptive Physical Oceanography
   Chapters 5, 6, , 7.
6. Adrian Gill's Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics
   Chapters 1, 2, 3.

7. Pijush Kundu's Fluid Mechanics
   Chapter 7.
8. Joe Pedlosky's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
   Chapters 1, 2.
9. Sverdrup, Johnson, and Fleming's The Ocean
   Chapter 10.
10. Siedler, Church & Gould's WOCE Volume,
    The Ocean: Circulation and Climate
    Chapters 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3.
11. Geoff Vallis's Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics
    Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, Errata.

12. Wunsch's The Ocean Inverse Problem
    Chapter 2.
13. Chapman and Malanotte-Rizzoli's Notes on Henderschott's Wave Motions in the Ocean
14. Orwell's Politics and the English Language

The Competition

1. Ferrari and Joyce's MIT 12.808: Intro to Physical Oceanography
   Ferrari and Joyce's nice website for a similar class to ATOC5051.
2. Lynne Talley's SIO 210: Intro to Physical Oceanography
   Lynne Talley's nice website for a similar class to ATOC5051.

GFD Lab

1. Hart and Kittelman GFD Lab
2. John Marshall's (MIT) GFD Lab
3. Alistair Fraser's Bad Coriolis, with related Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere movies... Snopes version
   . Here's how to do it right. (very, very carefully! don't just flush)

Lists of Links

1. A Discussion Board with lots of links...
2. Some NASA Links...

Image from Siedler et al. 2001.

Data and Software

Useful websites for software

1. Matlab Sea-Mat
2. netcdf in Matlab (ncx browser)
3. netcdf in Matlab (netcdf toolbox)
4. Matlab OPeNDAP Ocean Toolbox
5. idl tips.
6. idl tips on opening netcdf files.
7. A LaTeX template for this class.
8. A LaTeX HowTo for MikTeX with the template above.
9. ncview, a graphical netcdf file browser.
10. A tool for producing pdf output on PCs/Windows
11. Mexnc for Matlab 2007a USE THIS INCASE you get errors like "mexcdf53 not found"

Data

1. The Dataserver for Class Data at Fox-Kemper.com/data
2. National Virtual Ocean Data System (NVODS)
3. National Oceanographic Data Service
4. Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (USGODAE)
5. NOAA Physical Sciences Division (PSD)
6. International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (iCOADS)
7. Southampton NOCS Flux Datasets (Winds, Heat Fluxes, etc.)
8. Ocean Watch Live Access Server: easy satellite data access.
9. PO.DAAC Home: another easy satellite data access.
10. Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO)
11. International Research Institute for Climate and Society/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (IRI/LDEO)
12. NOAA National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS)
13. EPIC
14. World Ocean Circulation Experiment
15. ODV-ready Datasets
16. AVISO SSH Datasets

ECCO Data Assimilation

1. ECCO
2. ECCO2

Other Models

1. PCMDI IPCC AR4 runs

Some simple matlab programs to try:

1. Simple Harmonic Oscillator
2. Simple Inertial Oscillator