Abstract

Recent advances in remote sensing and autonomous instruments are bringing into biological oceanography the spatio-temporal resolution long enjoyed by physical oceanography. While proxy-data from these sensors lack the level of detail from the standard, more laborious methods, this difference is more than compensated by the sheer volume. Biology could now adopt some of the approaches developed by physics. Notable among these is scaling the modes of variability and resolving and predicting the first order processes before trying to address the system in its full complexity. With large data sets, patterns can be isolated from the notoriously large stochastic variability in biological fields. In that regard, proxy variables present an inherently anti-aliased view; the trees are blurred out until the forest alone is seen. This approach should result in not only process level understanding but also a representation of ocean biology, which is more accessible to physical oceanographers and modelers. It is important to enhance the commonality between the two disciplines in the face of growing evidence that the coupling in the ocean is not always unidirectional. At times, biological processes significantly alter the boundary conditions for ocean physics. Such bi-directional coupling makes physical and biological oceanography mutually dependent on each other. With real examples from the open ocean, this talk will explore the challenges and opportunities in the intersection of physical and biological oceanography and illustrate how each would benefit from more affinity to the other.

Light refreshments are served in the Interaction Area (4th floor of the Oceanography/Physics Building) at 4:00 p.m.

All seminars begin at 3:00 p.m. and are held in room 200 of the Oceanography/Physics building.