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.
Recently completed the archived hindcast ROMS model results for the ONR Inner-Shelf Dynamics Experiment archive. Big thank you to Amy Waterhouse (SIO) and Jack McSweeney (Stonybrook) for continuing to get these out. Thanks to all the modelers and UCSD library staff who helped put this together. A subset of these model data now live on with access for all!
https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb79274781
Suanda, Sutara H.; Di Lorenzo, Emanuele; Miller, Arthur J.; Haas, Kevin; Edwards, Christopher A.; Moore, Andrew M.; Kumar, Nirnimesh; Xu, Tongtong; Cai, Donghua (2022). ISDE ROMS Hindcast model simulations. In Observations and Model Simulations from the Inner-Shelf Dynamics Experiment (ISDE). UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. doi.org/10.6075/J0930T97
Honored to have an overview of this paper make the cover of BAMS. Nick Statom (SIO) deserves all the photo credit and thank you to Jim Lerczak (OSU) for continuing to lead the charge. Proud of this work though the heart is heavy remembering Nirni and Sean. Their contributions live on but I miss their spirits.
Seasick Suanda 