Ocean Observing and Modeling Group

news and updates

Vol. 1 Issue 3, December 2014

Greeting from OOMG!

In addition to the news items below, please visit our website for more information of our real-time model portal, data and analysis products

banner: NCSU

 

Happy 2015 from OOMG! We wish you and yours a joyous New Year filled with peace, health and happiness.

 

OOMG News

[photos of OOMG members]

OOMG member Joseph Zambon successfully defended his dissertation and graduated on December 18. Congratulations Dr. Zambon!

 

OOMG member Yanlin Gong successfully passed his preliminary exams, and became a Ph.D. candidate. Congratulations Yanlin!

 

OOMG member Dr. Austin Todd attended the Mid-Atlantic Bight Physical Oceanography and Meteorology (MABPOM) meeting and presented latest results of his research project at the conference.  

 

We had a large personnel turnover in the last couple of months. In November, we said good bye to group members Dr. Yizhen Li  and Dr. Yi Xu. Yizhen is now a postdoc scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Yi is now the executive officer of IMBER's regional project office in Shanghai, China.  Undergraduate research assistant Taylor Shropshire will soon start his graduate program at Florida State University. Best wishes to everyone, and please stay in touch. We also welcome Dr. Joseph (Zhiren) Wang, who will join the group in January 2015 as a postdoc research associate. Dr. Wang received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Rutgers University in 2013.

 

[Photo of Dr. He at New Frontiers conference]

Dr. He attended the conference of New Frontiers of Altimetry in Constance, Germany in late October and and gave a keynote presentation. The conference was co-organized by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES). More than 200 scientists around the world participated in this week-long conference to exchange their latest results on how to best calibrate and apply long-term satellite altimetry observations in studying oceanography and hydrology.  

 

[photo of Dr. He with Chancellor Woodson]

 

In late November, Dr. He attended a dinner reception hosted by NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson. The reception was a wonderful opportunity to celebrate many great achievements the university had accomplished in 2014, and to network with the Chancellor and more than 50 university administrators and distinguished professors across the university. 

 

 

 

New Publications by OOMG members

 

Chen, K. and R. He (2014) Mean Circulation in the Coastal Ocean off Northeastern North America from a Regional-Scale Model, Ocean Science Discuss. doi: 10.5194/osd-11-2755-2014

 

Qian, H., Y. Li, R. He, and D. Eggleston (2014) Connectivity in the Intra-American Seas and Implications for Potential Larval transport, Coral Reefs, doi:10.1007/s00338-014-1244-0.

 

Zambon, J., R. He, and J. C. Warner (2014) Tropical to extratropical: Marine environmental changes associated with Superstorm Sandy prior to its landfall, Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1002/ 2014GL061357.

 

Xue, Z., J. Zambon, Z. Yao, Y. Liu, and R. He (2015) An integrated ocean circulation, wave, atmosphere, and marine ecosystem prediction system for the South Atlantic Bight and Gulf of Mexico, Journal of Operational Oceanography, in press.

 

Zeng, X., Y. Li, R. He, and Y. Yin (2015) Clustering of Loop Current Patterns Based on Satellite Observed Sea Surface Height and Self-Organizing Map, Remote Sensing Letters, in press.

 

He, J., Y. Zhang, T. Glotfelty, R. He, R. Bennartz, J. Rausch, and K. Sartelet (2015) Decadal simulation and comprehensive evaluation of CESM/CAM5.1 with advanced chemistry, aerosol microphysics, and aerosol-cloud interactions, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, in press.

 

 

Related News

 

Global Carbon Budget Release

[diagram of global CO2 budget]

The Global Carbon Budget is a collaborative effort of the global carbon cycle science community coordinated by the Global Carbon Project. The latest available data was published in September 21, 2014. The global carbon budget refers to the mean, variations, and trends in the anthropogenic perturbation of CO2 in the atmosphere, referenced to the beginning of the industrial era. It quantifies the input of CO2 to the atmosphere by emissions from human activities, the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the resulting changes in land and ocean carbon fluxes in response to increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, climate change and climate variability, and other anthropogenic and natural changes. An understanding of this perturbation budget over time and the underlying variability and trends of the natural carbon cycle are necessary to understand and quantify climate-carbon feedbacks. Read more.

 

Two Million Barrels of DWH Oil Found

[map image of oil in Gulf of Mexico]The location of two million barrels of oil spewed from the Macondo Well by the Deepwater Horizon disaster has been discovered. Researchers from UCSB, UCI, and WHOI used the presence of the biomarker hopane in sediment samples to describe a 3200 km2 footprint of crude oil in the deep ocean (1000 – 3000 m) Gulf of Mexico. They theorize that the oil was deposited there by the settling of an oil-rich layer of water and by the sinking of a “fallout plume” of suspended oil particles. This patch accounts for 4 – 31% of the deep ocean oil; an additional significant amount of crude oil is theorized to be on the ocean floor outside this area. Read more.

 

New, More Detailed Seafloor Map Released 

Scientists at Scripps Institute of Oceanography used the ESA’s CryoSat-2 satellite to map gravity measurements of the ocean floor, revealing thousands of seamounts and abyssal hills. Also elucidated for the first time are continental connections, evidence for seafloor spreading ridges in the Gulf of Mexico, and features buried under thick sediment layers. This high-resolution map fills in details between ship surveys, and will be available through Google’s ocean maps. Read more.

[image of Atlantic tectonic plates]

 

 

World Ocean Atlas 2013 Offers Finer Resolution 

The World Ocean Atlas 2013 provides modelers with higher quality, finer resolution climatological mean fields than previous editions. Temperature and salinity have been increased to 0.25 degree horizontal resolution, and vertical resolution now has 102 depth levels. Temperature and salinity means are presented as six decadal periods, removing historical hemispheric time biases. Ocean models and climate studies can now have more detailed, more precise data sets upon which to base research. Read more. Access the Atlas.[image of ocean temps from World Ocean Atlas]

 

Massive Diel Migration Affects Ocean Nitrogen 

[photo of schooling fish]

The daily migration of zooplankton and micronekton adds significant amounts of ammonia to zones of low-oxygen ocean water. These small predators consume phytoplankton near the surface at night, then descend 200 – 600 m during the day, where they choose patches of low-oxygen water to hide from predators. While there, they excrete ammonia, which undergoes anaerobic ammonium oxidation to N2. The great number of these animals may move enough nitrogen that they have a measurable impact on oxygen-minimum zone biogeochemistry. Read more.

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to our sponsors

[logos of sponsors: NSF, NASA, NOAA, DOI,ONR, DOE, USGS, BOEM, Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, SECOORA, Sea Grant NC, and UNC Coastal Studies Institute]

 

The Ocean Observing and Modeling Group

Dept. of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

North Carolina State University

visit our web page

Contact us: OceanObservingAndModeling@ncsu.edu