Research Summaries

Back Coastal Land-Air-Sea Interaction (CLASI) Pilot study in Monterey Bay, CA

Fiscal Year 2016
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Oceanography
Investigator(s) MacMahan, James H.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary A combined experimental, modeling and remote sensing study of the effect of depth-limited waves and topography on the local wind and wind stress vectors is proposed in a complex coastal region. This study will focus on the physical mechanisms of depth-limited wave breaking, sub-surface currents, and land/sea roughness identified in the recent studies that observed enhanced wind stress variability over the surf zone (Shabani et al, 2014), as well as in the vicinity of coastal inlets (Ortiz-Suslow et al, 2015). These types of processes may contribute to inaccuracies in model wind fields along the inner shelf, surf zone, and corresponding land-sea boundaries. The experiment will provide observations to describe the factors that influence the spatial variability of wind and wind-stress fields in an energetic coastal region with significant sub-aerial topographic features close to the shoreline.
It has been known that wind forecasts are deficient at the coastal boundary for some time. In large part this may be due to the fact that existing operational wind models have insufficient spatial resolution to incorporate such highly detailed processes, but there has not been a focused effort to better define and quantify all of the contributing factors. This mismatch between the wind model resolution and the higher spatial resolution at which nearshore wave and circulation models are currently being run, may result in large errors in key quantities such as the current velocities, wave heights and breakpoints. In particular we will seek to understand the effects of surface currents, waves and topography (both sub-surface and sub-areal) on the winds and wind stresses that couple the atmosphere and ocean and facilitate their incorporation into nearshore circulation models, explain some sources of the error variance and expand their application to wind-wave-current interaction studies.
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal