ATOC 5061, Fall 2011

ATOC 5061: Dynamics of Oceans
Or, Waves in Oceans.
Explores theories of the large-scale ocean, including quasigeostrophic, planetary geostrophic, and shallow water equations. Topics may vary to focus on ocean climate (e.g. thermocline, westward intensification), ocean waves (e.g. gravity, Rossby, and Kelvin), or ocean models (toy, analytic, and numerical). May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours. Prereqs., ATOC 5400 and ATOC 5051 or 5060 or equivalent.

Fall 2011 will focus on turbulence, from small scale to large-scale rotating, stratified turbulence of the oceans, but still using simple numerical models to illustrate. Fall 2010, focused more on ocean waves, instabilities, eddies, and wave-mean interaction, but still using simple numerical models to illustrate. In Spring 2009, the focus was mainly on ocean models, doing some hands-on numerical modeling of simple models, waves, and shallow water equations, as well as discussing toy and analytic models.