COSEE NOW

MPC released its drifter on Nov 14 in Monterey Bay. In the 2.5 months since release, it drifted south, nearly to the latitude of Pt Conception. Then, with the onset of winter storms and the presumable winter-time emergence of the Davidson Current (the slow, northward flowing current that replaces the California Current in the winter months), [...]

To begin my lecture on gyres and surface currents this morning, I showed them this image. This data, collected by our colleagues at Cape Fear Community College, definitely got their attention. This is especially noteworthy because we’re getting towards the end of the semester where students are dealing with all kinds of assignments and are just [...]

We launched the drifter again this past Saturday. This time we set it to transmit every six hours. We’re hoping that it goes out to sea and goes for a long ride. I find myself experiencing drifter envy over the beautifully long and sinuous path the Cape Fear Community College drifter has taken up the Gulf [...]

Our Vice president of Academic Affairs asked me the other day if the tsunami affected the motion of the drifters here in Monterey Bay. “Voile!” I thought, what a great idea for a lab. If our vice president thinks that the tsunami might have affected the drifters, then our students must have the same question. [...]

The MPC Drifters are back in the water this week as our MBARI collaboration continues for a second week. The data on the image above represents about 27 hours of data, from the afternoon of October 5 to about 6 pm local time of October 6. It illustrates quite nicely the 24-hour periodicity that is [...]

Sometimes it seems like articles in newspapers are published as if they were planned to coincide with my syllabus. This was one such week. We set the drifters adrift on Tuesday and only two days earlier, on Sunday, the New York Times published a piece on surface currents in Monterey Bay, Finding Order in the Apparent Chaos [...]

Well, the drifters are adrift here in Monterey Bay. They were deployed mid day today, local time by a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and three Oceanography students from Monterey Peninsula College. The study is part of an intensive effort to look at the physical oceanography associated with harmful algal blooms (HABs) [...]

Greetings from the Central Coast of California. This is my first attempt at blogging, so I hope I do it right. From what I’ve read on other blogs, I think I’m supposed to record my stream of consciousness and try to stay somewhat on topic. We’ll see how that goes. In an effort to kick-start our drifter [...]