The ability to cover the shorter term variability over a 
longer time with the instrumentation has provided a lot of 
insight. Large scale arrays are possible when groups get 
together, such as the cooperation between NOAA and ourselves at 
the Chesapeake Bay Institute. At that time, NOAA maintained 
four long-term moorings at the southern end of the Bay while we 
maintained three in the upper end of the Bay. There was an 
overlap of about a year-and-a-half and we learned quite a bit 
from that long-term measurement series. 
What have we learned? 
I'll be rather short and broad in view as some of these 
circulation studies encompass very many researchers even those 
from across the water. They are listed here in a crude chrono¬ 
logical order. Clearly there's been numerical modeling forever, 
but recently this has come to fruition in some very interesting 
models that a lot of researchers are finding very helpful. 
Meteorologically Forced Circulation: Just to remind our¬ 
selves as physical oceanographers that we discovered that the 
wind can move the water. We've always said, those of us who are 
old, that we clearly understood this from first principles, but 
we've been reminded by the new wave that the "wind driving has 
been neglected." There is some support for both positions, but 
the work done by Alan Elliot, Dong-Ping Wang, and the work done 
by Professor Pritchard and his students, specifically Grano, 
Vieira, and Goodrich has revealed fascinating details of the 
process. 
There's some truth on either side. But the work done by 
Alan Elliot and Dong-Ping Wang on the Potomac River and the work 
done by Don Pritchard and his students Grano, Vieira, and Dave 
Goodrich has shown what some of these circulations can do. A 
quick qualitative picture of what happens in the estuary: We 
have a simple Chesapeake Bay here. We took away the Potomac 
River and all the tributaries and the Susquehanna and treated it 
as simply a basin. I guess I can't assume that people are so un¬ 
couth as to blow on their soup. But I have in the interest of 
this experiment. When you blow on the soup, the water (soup) in 
the far end of the bowl sets up a little higher than the soup in 
the near end of the bowl. And if you blow too hard? 
But the primary consequence of the winds is a drop in the 
water level in the north end of the Bay. That's a common ex¬ 
perience. When there's a strong northwesterly, we get extremely 
low tides. Water is forced out of the Bay, and a classical two- 
layer circulation is set up, with strong flow to the south in 
the surface layers and a delayed up-estuary flow in the lower 
layers. 
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