FSU Physical Oceanography

Physical Oceanography

Physical oceanographers specialize in studies of the behavior of the fluid world. They study such ocean properties as temperature, salinity, wave motions, tides, and currents such as the Gulf Stream. They study the ocean-atmosphere relationship that influences weather and climate, the transmission of light and sound through water, and the ocean's interactions with its boundaries at the seafloor and the coast.

Physical oceanography requires a basic understanding of geophysical fluid dynamics (the study of fluid motion on a rotating sphere), classical physics, and applied mathematics.

Research programs at FSU are currently being conducted in many areas, including:

where does red tide in the Northern Gulf of Mexico originate (Clarke);
understanding and predicting El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (Clarke);
decadal and longer climate change (Clarke);
coastal fisheries and coastal ocean climate variability (Clarke);
understanding the dynamics of the ocean at scales from 100 km to 10,000 km, or equivalently from the deformation scale to the basin scale (Dewar);
dynamics of eddies (Dewar);
Gulf Stream rings and coherent structures (Dewar);
western boundary currents (Dewar);
forced and free mesoscale systems; mesoscale phenomena: nonlinear sciences (Dewar);
mixed-layer dynamics (Dewar);
turbulent convection, chaos, fluid instability, atmospheric convection, large scale ocean circulation (Krishnamurti);
movements of fluids within the ocean and its relationship to the interaction with the atmosphere above (Nof);
ocean physics (Nof);
physics of the Red Sea (Nof);
tides, waves and turbulent mixing (St. Laurent);
investigating the impact of rough topography on the ocean current (St. Laurent);
ocean circulation (Speer) and (Sturges);
"double diffusive" effects such as salt-fingers produced by the unique combination of temperature and salinity in the density stratified oceans (Stern);
basic fluid dynamics, especially as it relates to physical oceanography (Stern);
observations on the continental shelf of Florida (Sturges);
climate dynamics (Wacongne);
Southern Ocean air-sea fluxes (Wacongne);
circulation in the Gulf of Mexico (Weatherly) and (Sturges);
sub-thermocline ocean circulation (Weatherly);
bottom-boundary layers (Weatherly);
coastal oceanography and separation of coastal currents (Weatherly);