Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes

Oceanography examines how seawater moves, mixes, and exchanges heat across the planet, from basin-scale circulation driven by wind and density differences to the smaller swirling eddies and shallow surface layers that govern where heat, carbon, and nutrients actually end up. These processes collectively regulate Earth's climate, because the ocean absorbs and redistributes an enormous fraction of the energy entering the system from the sun. Researchers are actively working to resolve submesoscale turbulence—features just kilometers across—that numerical models have historically been too coarse to capture but that turn out to matter for large-scale budgets of heat and carbon. A parallel challenge is combining the sparse, uneven observations gathered from satellites, floats, and ships into coherent models through data assimilation, so that predictions of circulation changes under a warming climate become genuinely reliable.

Works

243,242

Total citations

2,087,183

Keywords

Oceanic ModelingOcean CirculationTidal AnalysisMesoscale EddiesMixed Layer DepthGlobal Heat Transport