3. Coastal Ocean Dynamics and Fluxes. Important studies for this program include 

 circulation, mixing, and particle dispersion in coastal and estuarine waters and large lakes. 

 Base funding for these activities should be adequate for continuation of the present level of 

 effort, e.g., an occasional CODE-type experiment. However, this base funding seems inadequate 

 to support anticipated growth in coastal studies, including addition of physical oceanography 

 faculty at "marine biological" laboratories and at coastal academic institutions which presently 

 employ no physical oceanographers. Faculty members at these primarily state-supported 

 institutions have access to state funding and facilities and can thus carry out some effective 

 studies in local waters with rather modest supplemental funding from the Foundation. Budgeting 

 for this growth fits with NSF infrastructure and undergraduate institution initiatives. $.5M 



per year would support five to ten such projects each year. 



A second area of projected growth is in multidisciplinary experiments to study the chemical, 

 biological and geological fluxes along and across the continental shelf and slope. The Coastal 

 Ocean Dylnamics Experiment (CODE) and Organization of Persistent Upwelling Systems (OPUS) 

 programs have recently discovered a number of new mechanisms for these fluxes, e.g., intense 

 squirts and jets, which can advect shelf water and material hundreds of kilometers offshore into 

 deep water, and energetic oceanic mesoscale eddies, which can directly influence 

 shelf circulation. These phenomena occur on a variety of scales, and these and other recent 

 observations suggest that the flow fields controlling property fluxes over the shelf and slope are 

 much more turbulent than previously imagined. The further definition and understanding of 

 these phenomena needed for studies in other ocean disciplines will require a substantial 

 investment of physical oceanography resources. Support of one such field experiment per year 

 would cost $2.5M. 



Finally, recent theoretical and observational work is beginning to provide the critical 

 intellectual framework needed for more advanced numerical modeling of coastal phenomena. The 

 dynamical roles of bottom friction, stratification, wind and tidal mixing, and coastal topography 

 in wind and buoyancy-forced motions are now better understood and allow construction of more 

 realistic process and regional numerical models. Growth in this area will depend critically on 

 the Foundation, in terms of both encouraging work from a wider group of investigators and 

 providing adequate computational resources, especially access to NCAR. Support for this growth 

 has been budgeted above. 



4. Aircraft Capability. Use of scientific aircraft for remote sensing of sea surface and 

 air/sea fluxes has become increasingly important in recent years. Aircraft measurements in 

 conjunction with coastal oceanography experiments are now common for production of maps of 

 wind stress, sea surface temperature, and subsurface temperature (using expendable 

 bathythermographs). Development of geodetic receivers and laser altimeters has increased the 

 utility of these aircraft measurements, as has development of aircraft-mounted passive and 

 active radiometers and radars. In the future, aircraft surveys of dynamic features will be 

 possible, resulting in truly synoptic data at meso- to large scales, and WOCE and TOGA will 

 require extensive measurements of air/sea fluxes, in part to improve our understanding and 

 parameterization of these processes. 



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