What a first day on the water in North Carolina! Red carpet treatment from RV Seahawk and CMS dive team. This scoping adventure was the official start of our collaboration with BOEM to study Frying Pan Shoals. We have deployed a MOSTLY empty test lander and sand-screwed a few driveway posts. What? Yup, you have heard of driveway poles to mark the snow, here we hope to mark sand accretion or erosion at 3, 8, and 12 km from shore!
Big kudos to University of Otago PhD student, Arnaud Valcarcel on submitting his thesis today! Arnaud has had quite the journey during his PhD. From ship delays to COVID cruise delays, he persisted and has now seen the work through. In a short amount of time, he has applied many newly developed ocean research skills from instrumentation and days at sea to complex data analysis and numerical modeling. From a cosmologist to now an oceanographer, I am excited to see what you will do next!
Excited to be involved in this upcoming project, FishFry. We will be measuring ocean currents, waves, sediment and biology around Frying Pan Shoals. Huge effort by Dr. Joe Long to lead our UNCW team and put together a winning proposal. Looking forward to working with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). Lots more on this to come, but for now a reminder of these wonderful North Carolina Shoals:
Our Annual Reviews article is available as an early online release! This effort with Melissa Moulton, Jess Garwood, Melanie Fewings and Jamie Pringle has been tremendously fun and rewarding. It also would not have been possible without our dear Nirnimesh Kumar who worked and advocated for this paper from the beginning. I am extremely proud to be part of it all:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-marine-032122-115057
As the summer slowly closes, I wanted to acknowledge all the exciting happenings within Coastal and Estuarine Hydrodynamics. Along with my co-Assistant Professor PIs Derek Grimes and Qianqian Liu, this really felt like a working research group! There was travel to conferences and into the field, research students moving on, proposals submitted and plenty of local activity.
We were happy to host Ruben Trejo and Karla Mills as part of the NSF REU program and supervised by Derek and Qianqian. They were never afraid to get dirty and brought enthusiasm and fresh eyes to our research topics including, physical measurements of boat wakes in the intracoastal and model-data evaluation for a Pamlico Sound hydrodynamic model. We wish them the best in their future science pursuits!
We completed a successful week back in Monterey. As part of the large-scale instrument array, 71 locations were recovered, some from land and some from sea. Thanks to all who participated! This will be quite the dataset to study wave transformation and current variability in rocky nearshore environments. Follow along at the SIO ROXSI website and blog: https://roxsi.ucsd.edu/
Congratulations to University of Otago PhD student, Rafael Costa Santana! Almost 3 years to the day that he began his PhD research, Rafa has submitted his thesis for evaluation. Rafa has been remarkably efficient in being able to use ocean observations, and apply data assimilation techniques to better understand transport and variability of the East Auckland Current. He continues on with a post-doc at the University of Auckland and is sure to have many terrific future opportunities.
Exciting times! Our first deployments for the ROXSI field program off of Monterey, CA. Big thanks to Jamie MacMahan (NPS) for hosting and co-ordinating the efforts for the large-scale array.
A great big thank you to recent UNCW Physics graduate, Cody Benton. For the last year, Cody has worked on a variety of projects from data curation and analysis, to poster presentations, public outreach, and instrument turn-arounds. Sad to see you go, but very excited for your next chapter: a PhD program at Rutgers University! But first, a European adventure and Utah backpack trek. Have fun out there!
Thank you to the Hench Lab for hosting my visit to the Duke Marine Laboratory and Beaufort, NC. Dolphin pods were meant to swim by the windows of the seminar room, but no such luck. This area has certainly seen a lot. Pamlico and Algonquian Native Americans to the town of Beaufort, established in 1713. It was a port-of-call in the trans-Atlantic and trans-American slave trade, Blackbeard the pirate ran aground, and marine research since the 1800s.
Seasick Suanda 