ATOC 5051, Spring 2010 — 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 reading.

Paper #3: I Get Around

Download a wind stress dataset from ECCO, COADS, etc. There are some wind files that I have pre-processed here. These already have wind stress curl calculated, too.

They are derived from the:

1. Grist & Josey climatology
2. The ECCO data-assimilating model iteration 199
3. The Hellerman & Rosenstein Climatology
4. The SCOW Climatology
5. The NSCAT scatterometer data

I have given you the wind stresses and wind stress curls. 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 and this paper.