News

November 2024: I implemented the so-called ‘spectral’ palette of ColorBrewer into Matlab/Octave. I was inspired by Cynthia Brewer’s 1997 study arguing that carefully-designed ‘rainbow’ palettes used in the appropriate circumstances are preferred and interpreted accurately. I appreciate the thought behind #EndTheRainbow but an indiscriminate ban appears misguided.
November 2024: Olivia Szot successfully defended her M.Sc. thesis at VIMS: Quantifying the drivers of hypoxia onset variability in the Chesapeake Bay.
October 2024: A cracked case on my beloved Zareason laptop has been causing its components to fail one after the other. I’m hoping the new Framework I purchased will stay with me for a very long time because of its repairability and debian’s policy of no forced obsolescence. Fingers crossed.
September 2024: Adena Schonfeld had her study “Hypoxia influences the extent and dynamics of suitable fish habitat in Chesapeake Bay, USA” accepted for publication in MEPS. The study is partly based on 3D model results that I provided.
September 2024: I gave a webinar for the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Acidification Network (MACAN) titled A “How To” guide to the digital atlas for physical and biogeochemical conditions in the Chesapeake Bay. The recording and the material covered are available.
August 2024: Fei Da had his study “Influence of rivers, tides, and tidal wetlands on estuarine carbonate system dynamics” accepted for publication in Estuaries and Coasts.
July 2024: Collaborator Kyle Hinson had his study “Response of hypoxia to future climate change is sensitive to methodological assumptions” accepted for publication in Scientific Reports.
July 2024: I provided 3D model results to Gina Ralph for her evaluation of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab sanctuary through habitat suitability. Her study appeared in MEPS this month.
June 2024: Colin Hawes successfully defended his M.Sc. thesis at VIMS: Modeling mid-21st century Chesapeake Bay hypoxia: The role of climate change and the ocean, land, and atmospheric boundaries.
June 2024: I gave a presentation titled An atlas for physical/biogeochemical conditions in the Chesapeake Bay at the Chesapeake Community Research Symposium (ChesCRS2024) in Annapolis MD. More information is available here.
May 2024: Our project titled Integrated experimental and modeling assessment of ocean alkalinity enhancement for scalable marine carbon dioxide removal is officially funded by ARPA-E as part of the SEA-CO2 program.
April 2024: The increasing popularity of Julia, R, Python, gave me FOMO for some time. Then I started writing wrapper functions to invoke whichever one I needed for a given task. I find it amusing that this is how Matlab began in the 1970s, as an interactive wrapper for FORTRAN’s LINPACK subroutines (Moler & Little 2020).
March 2024: Collaborator Guangming Zheng had his manuscript “Hypoxia forecasting for Chesapeake Bay using artificial intelligence” accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems, a new-ish AMS journal dedicated to this topic.
March 2024: We released a new dataset titled An atlas for physical and biogeochemical conditions in the Chesapeake Bay. The atlas includes 27 environmental variables and is designed to be compatible with QGIS, Python, R, Matlab or GNU Octave. A separate documentation for the atlas features 45 pages of ready-made visualizations.
March 2024: I implemented the colormap/palette of Ocean Data View (ODV) into Matlab/Octave for a collaboration. The function can be grabbed here.
March 2024: Our study “Response of onshore oceanic heat supply to yearly changes in the Amundsen Sea icescape (Antarctica)” was accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research. I thank the reviewers and editor for taking the time to read and evaluate the manuscript. The key points are:
1. Ice shelves such as Crosson and Thwaites have multiple viable sources of oceanic heat helping to sustain their high melting rates
2. The relative importance of these sources evolve in response to changes in icescape such as the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier Tongue
3. The fast-ice cover seaward of Pine Island Glacier does not mitigate its high melting rates and has remote impacts reaching up to Crosson
This is a contribution to the AMICUS and ARTEMIS projects.
March 2024: Collaborator Dante Horemans had his study titled “Evaluating the skill of statistical species distribution models trained with mechanistic model output” published in Ecological Modelling.
February 2024: I gave a presentation titled “How does the oceanic heat supply to ice shelves respond to year-to-year changes in the Amundsen icescape?” at Ocean Sciences Meeting 2024 in New Orleans LA.
February 2024: Catherine Czajka successfully defended her thesis titled “Projected impacts of climate change and watershed management on carbonate chemistry and oyster growth in two Virginia tributaries”. She used the oyster bioenergetics model “EcoOyster” (Brush & Kellogg 2018) that I embedded into a 120m ROMS nest in order to simulate present/future growth in southwestern Chesapeake Bay.
February 2024: I participated in the kickoff event of the SEA-CO2 program and in ARPA-E’s annual ‘Ocean Week’ (Alexandria VA).
January 2024: We submitted an abstract titled An atlas for physical/biogeochemical conditions in the Chesapeake Bay for the upcoming Chesapeake Community Research Symposium (ChesCRS) in Annapolis MD (10–12 June 2024).
November 2023: Our study “On the sensitivity of coastal hypoxia to its external physical forcings” was accepted for publication in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES). I thank the reviewers and editor for taking the time to read and evaluate the manuscript. This is a contribution to the Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project led by PNNL and funded by DOE.
November 2023: I presented an intercomparison of the circulation of five Chesapeake Bay tributaries at the biennial conference of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) in Portland OR. Many other fellow members of the BioCOM lab were there to present their work.
October 2023: We gave a presentation at the (virtual) ITGC Annual Science Meeting (10–12 October 2023).
September 2023: I gave a lightning talk titled The Chesapeake Bay Environmental Forecast System (CBEFS) at the annual MARACOOS meeting in Baltimore, MD.
September 2023: I wrote down my notes on the creation of a new model grid for ROMS.
June 2023: I participated in the 2023 Gordon Research Conference on Coastal ocean dynamics in Smithfield RI.
June 2023: Added a testcase for spinning-up the Southern Ocean from a state of rest in beom.
May 2023: REU intern Jennifer Lin (B.Sc. Computational & Applied Mathematics and Statistics, W&M) is beginning her research project at VIMS titled “Empirical habitat models for harmful algae blooms in the Chesapeake Bay” funded by NSF Award 1950242.
May 2023: I gave a presentation at the York River and Small Coastal Basin Symposium held at VIMS.
May 2023: We archived a dataset titled “Numerical experiments on the sensitivity of Chesapeake Bay hypoxia to physical forcings and the associated code and input files”.
May 2023: Two cruises took place in the York and Potomac tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay for the NSF-funded CHALK project. This collaborative project investigates how estuarine carbon and alkalinity dynamics are influenced by macrobiota in two contrasted tributaries.
April 2023: Kyle Hinson had his study titled “Impacts and uncertainties of climate-induced changes in watershed inputs on estuarine hypoxia” accepted for publication in Biogeosciences.
February 2023: Collaborator Dante Horemans had his study titled “Forecasting Prorocentrum minimum blooms in the Chesapeake Bay using empirical habitat models” accepted for publication in Frontiers in Marine Science.
February 2023: Collaborator Mike Dinniman had his study titled “Sensitivity of the relationship between Antarctic ice shelves and iron supply to projected changes in the atmospheric forcing” accepted for publication in J. Geophys. Res.
January 2023: Fei Da successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis at VIMS. His thesis is titled “Chesapeake Bay carbonate cycle: Past, present, and future”.
January 2023: Graduate student Rui Jin had her study “Comparing two ocean biogeochemical models of Chesapeake Bay with and without the sulfur cycle instead highlights the importance of particle sinking, burial, organic matter, nitrification and light attenuation” accepted for publication in Ocean Modelling. The technical aspects of her study are further documented into MethodsX.
January 2023: A new dataset containing a numerical simulation of the ocean, sea ice and ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea (Antarctica) over the period Jan. 2006–March 2022, as well as its code and input files, has been publicly archived (https://doi.org/10.25773/bt54-sj65). The dataset is 2.2 terabytes in size. (To download files in bulk, use wget in a loop inside a shell script.) The dataset is a contribution to the AMICUS and ARTEMIS projects.
January 2023: I gave a presentation titled “S.T.A.R.: Shellfish Thresholds and Aquaculture Resilience” at the NOAA ocean acidification community meeting & mini symposium (Scripps Seaside Forum, La Jolla CA, 4–6 January 2023).
December, 2022: I gave two presentations at the Fall AGU Meeting: (1) “On the relative importance of offshelf/onshelf drivers of variability in mCDW inventory on the Amundsen Shelf, Antarctica”, and (2) “Sensitivity of Chesapeake Bay hypoxia to physical forcings: A regional Earth System Modeling perspective”.
September, 2022: I gave a webinar to the ICoM group, titled “Sensitivity of Chesapeake Bay hypoxia to physical forcings”.
June 12–17, 2022: I participated in the ARTEMIS / ITGC meeting that took place in Boulder CO.
June 6–8, 2022: The Chesapeake Community Research Symposium (ChesCRS) took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Annapolis, MD. I gave a presentation on the circulation of the York and Rappahannock estuaries.
May 7, 2022: CNN had an article covering the recent TARSAN-ARTEMIS-THOR expedition.
March 31, 2022: I gave a presentation titled “Hypoxia, warming and coastal acidification in the Chesapeake Bay” for the Environmental Studies Program of Virginia Beach’s City Public Schools. This took place inside the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Brock Environmental Center which is Living Building-certified.
March, 2022: The TARSAN-ARTEMIS-THOR expedition is completed and the team is on their way back to civilization. The icebreaker collected 300 vertical profiles of physical and biogeochemical properties, and just as many were collected by 20 diving instrumented seals over a week. The expedition focused on the Dotson and Getz ice shelves while heavy sea ice conditions prevented access to the Thwaites ice shelf. The data collected will be central to the projects AMICUS and ARTEMIS.
February, 2022: My collaborators gave a number of presentations at the Ocean Sciences Meeting (Feb.24 to March 4). Mine was about the circulation of the York and Rappahannock estuaries.
January, 2022: The TARSAN-ARTEMIS-THOR expedition has begun. The research icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer has left Punta Arenas (Chile) and is headed toward the Amundsen Sea (Antarctica; see project ARTEMIS). The expedition can be followed on twitter and instagram.
December, 2021: Luke Frankel had his study “Nitrogen reductions have decreased hypoxia in the Chesapeake Bay: Evidence from empirical and numerical modeling” published in Sci. Total Environ. Luke recently graduated from W&M’s School of Marine Science (M.Sc.) and is now a project scientist at FB Environmental Associates (Dover NH).
November, 2021: Collaborator Kaycee Coleman gave a presentation titled A habitat suitability index for oyster restoration in Maryland at the meeting of the American Fisheries Society in Baltimore MD. The BioCOM lab (and collaborator Emily Rivest) also had a large presence at the 2021 CERF meeting. For my part, I gave a presentation titled Contrasting the estuarine circulation of the York and Rappahannock estuaries.
September, 2021: Collaborators M.S.Dinniman, L.Herbert and E.Schwans each gave a presentation at the 2021 WAIS Workshop in Sterling VA.
July, 2021: Toolboxes for spectral analysis often produce plots with relative units (e.g., decibels) which always felt unsatisfying. I wrote down my notes on how to obtain a heatmap of energy spectral density with absolute units, using the LTFAT toolbox.
On a different topic, I participated to the CBP’s Modeling Workgroup Quarterly Review of July 2021 with a presentation titled “The importance of scale in the simulation of Chesapeake Bay”. Also, Luke Frankel defended his M.Sc. thesis at VIMS this month. His thesis is titled “Quantifying the increased resiliency of Chesapeake Bay hypoxia to environmental conditions: A benefit of nutrient reductions”.
June, 2021: My collaborators Sharon Stammerjohn and Patricia Yager both had a research project selected for funding recently. The first project, Antarctic sea ice, fast ice and icebergs: Modulators of ocean-ice shelf interactions (AMICUS) focuses on physical processes in the Amundsen Sea (west Antarctica) and is a collaboration with Ted Maksym and myself. The second project, Accelerating Thwaites Ecosystem Impacts for the Southern Ocean (ARTEMIS), focuses on the biogeochemical impacts of glacial melt in the same region. It includes a research cruise (TARSAN-ARTEMIS-THOR) between Jan. 2 and Mar. 8 2022 aboard the research icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer. The ARTEMIS proposal was officially accepted two years after submission (July 12, 2019) which highlights the challenges behind planning fieldwork in a pandemic.
June, 2021: There were a few articles accepted over the past months: (1) Environmentally-determined production frontiers and lease utilization in Virginia’s eastern oyster aquaculture industry, (2) Real-time environmental forecasts of the Chesapeake Bay: Model setup, improvements, and online visualization, (3) Extent and causes of Chesapeake Bay warming, (4) Mechanisms driving decadal changes in the carbonate system of a coastal plain estuary.
May 13, 2021: The 2021 York River Virtual Symposium was a multi-disciplinary forum on physical and social science, education, and management. I gave a 10 minute presentation on the estuarine exchange flow of the York estuary.
April, 2021: I uploaded a video illustrating a new 120m-resolution model of southwestern Chesapeake Bay. This model domain covers 37.2–38°N and includes the York and the Rappahannock Estuaries. The model is dedicated for water quality studies of this important area of the Virginian coast.
January, 2021: Jessie Turner published a study titled Effects of reduced shoreline erosion on Chesapeake Bay water clarity. It builds upon the work of Cerco et al. and Moriarty et al. to represent wind- and wave-driven resuspension of sediments and their impacts on particulate organic matter distributions.
January, 2021: I added two test-cases to beom. The first one represents dense water overflow on a continental slope, while the second is the classic “double gyre” spin-up experiment and features a mechanical energy budget.
December, 2020: My colleague Michael Dinniman gave a presentation titled “Sensitivity to changes in the winds of cryosphere contributions to micronutrient supply to the surface waters around Antarctica” at the AGU Fall Meeting 2020 (Dec. 7–11). It builds upon our recently published study and examines the effect of future atmospheric changes on iron supply to microalgal cells in Antarctica.
October, 2020: Daniel Crear recently published a study on sandbar shark and another one on cobia. I provided model results from the Chesapeake Bay for these two studies.
August 7, 2020: REU intern Sarah Hancock, who is seeking a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer science at Davidson College, just completed a study titled “Particulate organic matter (POM) distributions and dynamics in mid-Chesapeake Bay”. Her internship was funded by NSF (award 1950242). On a different topic, I uploaded a few videos of the Chesapeake Bay. The videos feature a 600m-resolution implementation of ROMS that I created with support from MARACOOS.
August 2020: We presented a virtual poster at SCAR Online 2020 (Aug. 3-7). The poster highlights the key oceanographic results of a recent publication on Getz Ice Shelf (Millan et al).
June 26, 2020: Our manuscript titled Relative impacts of global changes and regional watershed changes on the inorganic carbon balance of the Chesapeake Bay was accepted for publication in Biogeosciences. I presented this study recently at the 2020 Chesapeake Community Research Symposium and at the Goldschmidt conference (recording and slides available). Goldschmidt was my first experience with “asynchronous” (pre-recorded) presentations. Being able to download multiple talks at once (like entire sessions), and later watch them offline, on my own schedule, is a major improvement over traditional conferences.
May 22, 2020: My collaborator Romain Millan published a study titled Constraining an ocean model under Getz Ice Shelf, Antarctica, using a gravity-derived bathymetry. Our study reveals passages under the ice shelf having bottom depths often 500m deeper than previously thought. A video available in the “Supporting information” illustrates how this new information affects the circulation of warm water in a high-resolution model of the Getz Ice Shelf. The study was partly supported by OPP-1443657.
May, 2020: I was fortunate enough to receive exceptionally thoughtful, carefully written reports from anonymous reviewers over the years. I don't know who you are, but I acknowledge your selflessness and I thank you for it.
May 13, 2020: My collaborator Grace Kim published a study titled Impacts of water clarity variability on temperature and biogeochemistry in the Chesapeake Bay. Our study illustrates the impact of coupling biology and physics over the heat budget of the largest estuary in the continental U.S.
May 6, 2020: I gave a plenary talk at the Planning Workshop of the GP17 section of US GEOTRACES (recording and slides available).
April 23, 2020: My colleague Michael Dinniman just published a study titled Analysis of iron sources in Antarctic continental shelf waters. It builds upon earlier studies that linked microalgal biomass to glacial melt, and linked glacial melt to a physical supply of iron (the “meltwater pump”). The importance of this causal chain is highlighted in numerical experiments where the “pump” is turned on/off, which has a dramatic impact on the model's ability to match known circumpolar distributions of microalgal biomass.
April 7, 2020: I gave a presentation at the Modeling Workgroup Quarterly Review of the Chesapeake Bay Program. The presentation was titled Effects of sea level rise on the seasonal cycle of Chesapeake tidal water temperatures.
My lock screen displays random fortunes on a pseudo green phosphor screen. Recently, I improved the lock screen by piping fortune into cowsay. I'm pleased with the result.
February 2020: Collaborators Michael Dinniman and Patricia Yager gave presentations at the Ocean Sciences Meeting about our work on the Amundsen Sea and the broader Antarctic continental shelf. Graduate students of the BioCOM lab also showcased their research work: Fei Da, Luke Frankel, Kyle Hinson and Jessie Turner.
January 5, 2020: I added two new testcases to beom.
December 9-13, 2019: Romain Millan (U.Grenoble Alpes/UC Irvine), Eileen Hofmann (CCPO) and Emily Schwans (PSU) each gave a presentation at the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco, CA. The presentations were primarily focused on the Amundsen Sea but also covered (in the case of Eileen) the circum-Antarctic continental shelves.
November 18, 2019: I gave a short seminar in the department of Biological Sciences of VIMS. On a different topic, AVISO just released the latest version of their “global mean dynamic topography”, MDT CNES-CLS18. It represents our best estimate of the mean surface geostrophic circulation of the global ocean.
November 3-7 2019: I participated in the 2019 CERF conference (Nov.3-7, 2019, Mobile AL) and gave a presentation on Thursday November 7. The presentation was titled Impacts of sea level rise on Chesapeake Bay and its seasonal hypoxia.
October 23, 2019: I gave a seminar titled “Effects of sea level rise on hypoxia in the Chesapeake Bay” at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography (October 21) and at the Earth & Planetary Sciences department of Johns Hopkins University (October 23).
October 17, 2019: Patricia Yager gave a presentation at the 2019 WAIS meeting at Camp Cedar Glen, Julian CA. The presentation is titled How WAIS meltwater and earlier springtime opening may flip the Amundsen Sea Polynya from carbon sink to source. It is an extension of our earlier study led by Hilde Oliver (now a post-doctoral scholar at Woods Hole).
September 16, 2019: Michael Dinniman gave a presentation at the 33rd Forum for Research into Ice Shelf Processes (FRISP) in Oxford UK. The presentation is titled “Direct and indirect contributions of ice shelves to micronutrient supply to the surface waters around Antarctica”. It is a fascinating study where our earlier work on the Amundsen Sea is extended to all the Antarctic continental shelves.
July 29-August 2, 2019: I learned new valuable tricks at the ROMS 4D-Var Training Workshop in College Park MD. We received a fun little diploma at the end of the week. The background image refers to an infamous 1952 B movie featuring “Natural Vision 3-Dimension”.
June 10, 2019: Hilde Oliver successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis today at the University of Georgia. Her work on the Amundsen Sea Polynya was a key component of our project INSPIRE.
May, 2019: Graduate student Fei Da won the Best M.Sc. Student Paper Award of VIMS for his article Impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition and coastal nitrogen fluxes on oxygen concentrations in Chesapeake Bay. This article was part of our project DANCE.
April, 2019: Our manuscript Modeling iron and light controls on the summer Phaeocystis antarctica bloom in the Amundsen Sea Polynya was accepted for publication in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. The lead author is Hilde Oliver (UGA). This is part of our project INSPIRE.
April, 2019: Our manuscript Estuarine dissolved organic carbon flux from space: With application to Chesapeake and Delaware Bays was accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. The lead author is Sergio Signorini (NASA).
March, 2019: Our manuscript Modeling the seasonal cycle of iron and carbon fluxes in the Amundsen Sea Polynya, Antarctica is in press at Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. The dataset associated with the publication is also archived. This is part of our project INSPIRE.
February 7, 2019: I gave a seminar in VIMS' Physical Sciences department. This presentation was part of our project INSPIRE.
Apparently, Google Scholar’s “Sort by relevance” works by first selecting all references containing one of the words in the search query. Then, it ranks those references based primarily on some citation count, and to a much lesser extent based on how many words from the search query are present in the references. So an obscure but extremely-relevant reference will never be listed even if it exists in Scholar’s database. The index cards of the 1980s’ libraries worked better than this black box voodoo magic. This is not progress, it’s regression.
January 2019: Graduate student Hilde Oliver received an Outstanding Student Presentation Award from the AGU for her talk Controls on summer phytoplankton blooms in a highly productive Antarctic coastal polynya at the Fall AGU meeting. This presentation was part of our project INSPIRE.
I was intrigued to read that Andy Vaught was using an outdated computer system as his workhorse while he created g95. I'm starting to think that stability is the key ingredient to productive workdays.
January 2019: I gave a seminar at the Earth System Science department of UC Irvine. The seminar was titled Modeling the pathways of oceanic heat and glacial meltwater on the continental shelf of the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica and highlighted the results of our project INSPIRE. The seminar was hosted by Eric Rignot.
January 2019: Ken Zhao (UCLA) recently published a study titled Sill-influenced exchange flows in ice-shelf cavities in J.Phys.Oceanogr. His study brings much needed insight into the dynamics of ice shelf cavities such as Pine Island Glacier. Ken implemented a rigid lid in the back of envelope ocean model to highlight the 3 regimes characterizing the circulation.
December 2018: We gave 3 presentations at the 2018 Fall AGU meeting in relation to our project INSPIRE: Controls on summer phytoplankton blooms in a highly productive Antarctic coastal polynya by Oliver et al., High-resolution numerical ocean model illustrates how ice-sheet ocean interactions impact the biological pump of an Antarctic coastal polynya by Yager et al., and Direct and indirect contributions of the cryosphere to micronutrient supply to the open surface waters around Antarctica by Dinniman et al.
November 2018: We submitted a manuscript titled Modeling the seasonal cycle of iron and carbon fluxes in the Amundsen Sea Polynya, Antarctica. The manuscript is a key part of our INSPIRE project.
November 2018: Our manuscript titled Ocean circulation causes strong variability in the Mid-Atlantic Bight nitrogen budget was accepted for publication in J.Geophys.Res.
September 2018: We gave 2 presentations at the 2018 WAIS workshop in relation to our INSPIRE project: Controls on marine primary productivity in a coastal polynya receiving large iron inputs from melting West Antarctic ice shelves by Oliver et al., and Hi-res model illustrates how melting ice impacts coastal carbon cycle by Yager et al.
July 2018: Graduate student Hilde Oliver submitted a manuscript titled Modeling iron and light controls on the summer Phaeocystis antarctica bloom in the Amundsen Sea Polynya. The manuscript is a key part of our INSPIRE project.
July 2018: After a premature keyboard failure (T400) and a premature screen failure (T430), I gave up on Lenovo ThinkPads entirely and purchased a Zareason notebook with Linux debian preinstalled. I love it and wish I had done this earlier.
May-June 2018: We did science outreach at two annual events: STREAM day in Virginia Beach (May 8), and the Big Blue Camp at Old Dominion University (June 18-19).
June 2018: Our manuscript Impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition and coastal nitrogen fluxes on oxygen concentrations in Chesapeake Bay was accepted for publication in J. Geophys. Res. Oceans. This is part of our DANCE project.
June 13, 2018: I gave a talk at the 2018 Chesapeake Bay Research and Modeling Symposium (ChesRMS2018) in Annapolis MD. The presentation was titled Changes in Chesapeake Bay air-sea CO2 fluxes over the past century.
May 12-13, 2018: We had our last annual meeting for project INSPIRE at University of Georgia, Athens.
March 2018: The full dataset of Pathways and supply of dissolved iron in the Amundsen Sea (Antarctica) was submitted to BCO-DMO in August 2017 and is now available online. As far as I know, this is the first archived dataset with enough resolution (spatial and temporal) to quantify the fluxes of properties due to mesoscale eddies in this region. This is part of our INSPIRE project.
February, 2018: We had multiple presentations at OS2018 for our work on Chesapeake Bay and the Mid-Atlantic Bight: Interannual variability of lateral nitrogen and carbon fluxes along the Mid-Atlantic Bight (St-Laurent et al.), Impacts of direct atmospheric deposition of nitrogen and continental shelf nitrogen fluxes on Chesapeake Bay hypoxia (Da et al.), Changes in Chesapeake Bay carbon cycling over the past century (Friedrichs et al.), Chesapeake Bay export of dissolved organic carbon from space-borne data (Signorini et al.), and Carbon Budget of tidal wetlands, estuaries, and shelf waters of eastern North America (Najjar et al.).
February, 2018: The INSPIRE team gave 3 presentations at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting: What controls the massive phytoplankton bloom in the Amundsen Sea Polynya? (Oliver et al.), The ice shelf meltwater pump contribution to vertical exchange over the open shelf in the Amundsen Sea and elsewhere around Antarctica (Dinniman et al.) and High iron in outflow waters from the Dotson Ice Shelf cavity, Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica: Is glacial meltwater really the source? (Sherrell et al.). The 3 presentations are part of our INSPIRE project.
December 2017: The magazine Research Features recently interviewed co-PI Patricia Yager about the INSPIRE project. This led to an article communicating the project's goals and results to a general audience.
Oct. 8-11, 2017: My collaborator Patricia Yager presented our work at the 2017 WAIS meeting in Coupeville WA. The presentation was titled 'Meltwater pump' mechanism directly links the extreme Amundsen Sea phytoplankton bloom to the melting ice shelf (Yager et al.) This is part of our INSPIRE project.
September, 2017: I created a preprint version of Impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition on surface waters of the western North Atlantic mitigated by multiple feedbacks, now in production at J. Geophys. Res. Oceans. The dataset used in the study is permanently archived on a public repository at William & Mary. This is part of our DANCE project.
September, 2017: We submitted 3 abstracts for the upcoming 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting: What controls the massive phytoplankton bloom in the Amundsen Sea Polynya? (Oliver et al.), The ice shelf meltwater pump contribution to vertical exchange over the open shelf in the Amundsen Sea and elsewhere around Antarctica (Dinniman et al.) and High iron in outflow waters from the Dotson Ice Shelf cavity, Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica: Is glacial meltwater really the source? (Sherrell et al.). The three presentations are part of our INSPIRE project.
August, 2017: I created a preprint version of Pathways and supply of dissolved iron in the Amundsen Sea (Antarctica) which is now in press at J. Geophys. Res. Oceans.
August 13-18, 2017: Hilde Oliver, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, presented her work titled Physical and biological controls on phytoplankton blooms in the Amundsen Sea Polynya at the 2017 International Goldschmidt Conference (France). This is part of our INSPIRE project.
June 19-22, 2017: We presented a poster titled Ice shelf melt-driven circulation of the deep layers in the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica at the 2017 international Forum for Research into Ice Shelf Processes (FRISP) workshop held June 19-22 in Bergen, Norway. The poster is based on our manuscript Pathways and supply of dissolved iron in the Amundsen Sea (Antarctica) submitted to J.Geophys.Res. This is part of our INSPIRE project.
June 5, 2017: Our science outreach activities of May 18 in Virginia Beach were featured in a local newspaper. In one of the pictures I'm showing the kids how to use a refractometer for measuring salinity.
April 10-13, 2017: My collaborator Michael Dinniman presented results from our INSPIRE project at the Southern Ocean Workshop The Southern Ocean, its dynamics, biogeochemistry and role in the climate system, Mesa Lab, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO, USA.
Apr. 7, 2017: As part of our NSF-funded project INSPIRE, we developed an educational booklet in collaboration with local artists and STEM educators (extract). The illustrator, Carl Twarog, was very excited about sending the the booklet to press today. Over the upcoming months the booklet will be implemented in schools and its efficiency evaluated by STEM specialist D.Dickerson.
April 7, 2017: My collaborator Robert Sherrell presented results from our INSPIRE project as part of an invited seminar at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The title was How natural iron fertilization works in productive west Antarctic shelf regions.
April 6, 2017: I presented a seminar titled Physical drivers of the highly-productive Amundsen Sea Polynya (Antarctica) for the OEAS Seminar Series at Old Dominion University. The seminar focused on our latest results from our INSPIRE project.
March 26, 2017: Graduate student Hilde Oliver (UGA) presented a poster titled What makes a bloom in the Amundsen Sea Polynya? A 1-D biogeochemical modeling perspective at the 2017 GRC conference on Polar Marine Science. Hilde is using the biogeochemical module developed for the INSPIRE project in a 1-D configuration mimicking the stations of the ASPIRE expedition.
Jan., 2017: The inclusion of a new bathymetric dataset in our Amundsen Sea model led to a dramatic improvement in the simulated basal melt rates of the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves. The new dataset reveals previously unknown deep channels beneath these two ice shelves. We thank Romain Millan for sharing the dataset with us for our INSPIRE project.
Oct., 2016: Our high-resolution model of the Amundsen Sea is featured (Figure-5) in the review article Modeling Ice Shelf/Ocean Interaction in Antarctica by M.S. Dinniman, X.S. Asay-Davis, B.K. Galton-Fenzi, P.R. Holland, A. Jenkins and R. Timmermann. This article is part of a special issue on ocean-ice interactions in the journal Oceanography (no 4, Dec. 2016).
Oct.14, 2016: We submitted an abstract to session 103 of the 2017 ASLO meeting (Feb.26 to March 3). The abstract (Yager et al.) is titled Melting ice sheet enhances coastal biological productivity and it is part of our investigations of the biological productivity in the Amundsen Sea Polynya (INSPIRE).
Oct.3-6, 2016: We had two presentations at the 2016 WAIS workshop held in Sterling, VA. This is part of our investigations of the biological productivity in the Amundsen Sea Polynya (INSPIRE).
Oct.1-2, 2016: Annual project meeting and workshop for INSPIRE at Old Dominion University.
September 2016: There were several changes regarding my email accounts in the past weeks:
1. Emails sent to pierre@ccpo.odu.edu are now handled by an external server and re-directed to pstlaure@odu.edu. This migration was necessary because of frequent power outages in the building hosting CCPO.
2. In theory I should receive all emails sent to pierre@ccpo.odu.edu or pstlaure@odu.edu. However, users have reported that the external server filters legitimate messages *before they even reach our spam trap*. Sadly I have no control on the situation.
3. If I have not replied to one of your emails in 1-2 days, please re-send your email to these three accounts simultaneously: pst-laurent@vims.edu pstlaure@odu.edu pierre@ccpo.odu.edu
4. All my outgoing emails now come from pstlaure@odu.edu or pst-laurent@vims.edu. I can no longer send emails from pierre@ccpo.odu.edu. I apologize for the inconveniences.
August 19, 2016: We submitted two presentation abstracts for the upcoming West Antarctic Ice Sheet workshop (WAIS) held Tuesday to Thursday, October 4-6, 2016 at the Algonkian Regional Park in Sterling, VA. This is part of our investigations of the biological productivity in the Amundsen Sea Polynya (INSPIRE).
July 10-15, 2016: We participated to the International Symposium on Interactions of Ice Sheets and Glaciers with the Ocean organized by the International Glaciological Society (IGS). The symposium was hosted by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the Scripps Seaside Forum, La Jolla, California, on July 10-15, 2016. Our presentation was titled Simulating the upward transport of sediment-derived iron associated with the overturning circulation in ice shelf cavities of the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica. This is part of our investigations of the biological productivity in the Amundsen Sea Polynya (INSPIRE).
March 2016: Our research activities on projects INSPIRE and DANCE was described in a feature article of the CCPO Newsletter: Phytoplankton responses to nutrient enrichment in high and mid-latitude seas, CCPO Circulation, vol.21, no 2 (Spring 2016).
Feb. 22-26, 2016: We presented the latest results from project INSPIRE at the Ocean Sciences meeting. I gave a talk titled Transport pathways of nutrients in the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica in session HE43B on Thursday at 2.30pm. Linquan Mu (UGA) presented a poster titled Investigating the Role of Mesoscale Processes and Ice Dynamics in Carbon and Iron Fluxes in a Changing Amundsen Sea (INSPIRE) in session HE44D on Thursday at 4pm.
February 4, 2016: Kirsty Tinto (LDEO) kindly accepted to provide preliminary bathymetric data of the area surrounding the Dotson Ice Shelf for our modeling project (INSPIRE). Bathymetry plays a central role in determining the pathway of warm Circumpolar Deep Water underneath the ice shelves as well as the location of the fresh meltwater outflow. The new bathymetric data of the Dotson Ice Shelf will make our estimates of basal melt and iron fluxes to the Amundsen Polynya even more accurate.
February 1, 2016: Teleconference for project INSPIRE.
December 22, 2015: Teleconference for project INSPIRE.
December 2015: Patricia Yager presented a poster on INSPIRE/ASPIRE at the 2015 Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.
November 2015: Our abstract entitled Transport pathways of nutrients in the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica has been accepted for an oral presentation at the 2016 Ocean Sciences meeting! This is part of our project examining the biological productivity of the Amundsen Sea Polynya (INSPIRE).
September 2015: We submitted three abstracts in connection with the INSPIRE project for the 2016 Ocean Sciences meeting, Feb. 21-26, 2016, New Orleans, Lousiana.
September 21-23, 2015: Project meeting and workshop for INSPIRE at Old Dominion University.
September 2015: Our study entitled Impact of local winter cooling on the melt of Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica has been accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research (doi:10.1002/2015jc010709, preprint). The study is part of our investigations on ocean ice-sheet interactions and the role of glacial melt in the biological productivity of western Antarctica (INSPIRE).
September 2015: Two members of the INSPIRE team, Sharon Stammerjohn and Patricia Yager, will be giving talks about the Amundsen Sea Polynya at the 2015 West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Workshop!
June 2015: Our project Investigating the role of mesoscale processes and ice dynamics in carbon and iron fluxes in a changing Amundsen Sea (INSPIRE) has been recommended for funding! We are hoping to get a confirmation over the next weeks. This exciting project involves the ASPIRE team and three researchers from ODU: Robert Sherrell (Rutgers), Sharon Stammerjohn (U.Colorado), Patricia Yager (UGA), and Daniel Dickerson, Eileen Hofmann and I (ODU). I will post more information in the weeks to come...
May 2015: I will be presenting a poster at the Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry Summer Science Workshop. The workshop is held July 20-23 2015 at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Quissett Campus in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
March 12, 2015: My collaborator Robert Sherrell is heading for the Gordon Research Conference on Polar Science in Lucca, Italy. He will be presenting a poster describing our investigations of mesoscale processes and ice dynamics in carbon and iron fluxes in the Amundsen Sea.
February 12, 2015: I visited the Virginia Institute of Marine Science under the invitation of Marjorie Friedrichs. She leads several projects investigating the impact of physical processes and human activities on the coastal environment. I gave a seminar entitled Melt of ice shelves in western Antarctica: Its physical drivers and the effects on the marine environment for their Physical Sciences Seminar Series.
February 2-5, 2015: My colleague Michael Dinniman participated to the Southern Ocean and Biogeochemistry workshop at Caltech. He presented some results from our investigations on ocean ice-sheet interactions in western Antarctica.
January 7, 2015: We recently submitted a manuscript investigating the role of coastal polynyas in the melt of the ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea. The study is based on the high-resolution ice-ocean model that we developed over the last year. This is part of our investigations on ocean ice-sheet interactions in western Antarctica.
November 2014: I updated the movies showing the spin-up of the subtropical gyre.
June 17, 2014: As part of our investigations of ocean ice-sheet interactions in western Antarctica we developed during the last year an eddy-resolving 3-D sea ice-ocean model of the Amundsen Sea (see previous link for additional information). This model is currently being updated to use the new IBCSO bathymetric database (Arndt et al., 2013) and the high-resolution (10-30km) atmospheric forcing from the Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System (AMPS). These developments improve the model skill and help us to better understand the processes controlling ice shelf melt in this part of Antarctica (follow this link for a movie of the simulated glacial meltwater).
May 23, 2014: I recently visited Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and gave a seminar for their Ocean and Climate Physics Seminar Series. The seminar was entitled Seasonal and spatial variability of glacial meltwater in the Amundsen Sea: Insight from numerical models. I am collaborating with Xiaojun Yuan of LDEO to understand the effects of the melt of the ice shelves in this part of Antarctica (see a movie of the simulated ocean temperature at 300meters depth).
April 15, 2014: The last Ocean Sciences meeting gave me the opportunity to meet the members of the ASPIRE team who sampled the Amundsen Sea during the austral summer of 2010-2011. We recently submitted together an exciting proposal entitled Investigating the role of mesoscale processes and ice dynamics in carbon and iron fluxes in a changing Amundsen Sea. This collaborative effort brings together Daniel Dickerson, Eileen Hofmann and I (ODU), Robert Sherrell (Rutgers), Sharon Stammerjohn (U.Colorado) and Patricia Yager (UGA).
March 15, 2014: I participated to the 2014 Tidewater Science and Engineering Fair at the Webb Center of ODU. I was a judge for the senior student projects in the “Environmental Sciences” Category.
March 1, 2014: I gave a talk at the 2014 Ocean Sciences Meeting that took place Feb.23-28 in Honolulu, HI. The talk was entitled Dispersion of Glacial Meltwater by Eddies in the Amundsen Sea and the session was Antarctic marginal seas and shelf/slope processes: physical and biological variability, controls, and links to larger scales (session 040).
October 3, 2013: We presented a poster entitled What determines the differences in basal melt between ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea? at the 2013 West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Workshop in Sterling VA. This is part of our research on ocean-ice shelves interactions.
13 July 2013: Nothing beats reading a thesis from 1969 to realize how much society evolved, for the best in this case. An extract from the Acknowledgments section:
The author is indebted to a number of people [...]. To the typists, Mrs. William Delaney and Miss Christine O'Hara, the author is indebted for their careful work. The most devoted assistance came from my wife, Esther. For her encouragement and enthusiasm in my work, as well as for the hours she spent in preparing all the figures, all the while raising a family of four, I am inexpressibly grateful.
17-19 June 2013: My colleague Michael Dinniman presented my poster at the FRISP meeting in Powys, Wales. The poster is What determines the differences in basal melt between ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea?. This is part of our research on ocean-ice shelves interactions.
9-14 June 2013: I was a participant at the GRC Coastal Ocean Circulation meeting in Biddeford ME. I presented a poster called Stable vs Unstable slope currents and cross-shelf exchanges in coastal troughs. This is part of our research on ocean-ice shelves interactions.
22 Jan. 2013: Our article On the Role of Coastal Troughs in the Circulation of Warm Circumpolar Deep Water on Antarctic Shelves is included in the first 2013 issue of JPO (vol.43, number~1, p.51-64, doi:10.1175/JPO-D-11-0237.1, preprint). The article is part of our research on ocean-ice shelves interactions.
Oct. 14-19, 2012: I volunteered for the CCPO booth at the 2012 OCEANS MTS/IEEE meeting in Hampton Roads, Virginia. This meeting brings together the technology, people, and ideas that will help to expand the understanding of the earth's largest natural resource. Hampton Roads maritime heritage combined with its strategic location near key decision makers from the U.S. Government make this venue a perfect opportunity to address the challenges facing the world's users of the ocean.
24 August 2012: I gave a talk at the 2012 West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Initiative Workshop that took place Sept.19-22 in Eatonville, Washington. The talk was entitled Influence of Ocean Circulation Patterns on Ocean Heat Transport to Ice Shelves.
12-14 June 2012: I gave a talk at the 26th Forum for Research into Ice Shelf Processes (FRISP) held at Utö Värdshus in the Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. The talk was entitled Comparing the Oceanic Heat Transport to Antarctic Ice Shelves for Two Generic Continental Shelves.
15 May 2012: Our article A conceptual model of an Arctic Sea is in press for JGR (preprint). In this paper we propose an idealized model of a basin driven by river runoff, atmospheric fluxes, sea ice melt/growth, and winds. The model reproduces several features from mooring observations of Hudson Bay, and it is used to interpret the seasonality of the freshwater export. The article is part of our research on freshwater exchanges in Arctic Seas.
22-27 April 2012: I gave two talks at the 2012 IPY Conference held in Montréal, Québec: Cross-Shelf Exchanges in Antarctica in the Presence of Troughs (Session Polar Ocean Processes) and Freshwater Exchanges between Arctic Shelves and the Open Ocean: Insight from an Idealized Model (Session Evolving coastal near-shore and shelf processes in polar regions).
13 March 2012: I was a judge at the 2012 St. Pius X Middle School Science fair in Norfolk VA.
20-24 February 2012: My colleague Michael Dinniman presented my poster at Session 033 (Oceanographic Processes at the Antarctic Continental Margins) of the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting (Salt Lake City, Utah). The poster was entitled Cross-shelf exchanges induced by troughs.
19 Dec. 2011-14 Feb. 2012: I took part to the PRISM cruise in the Ross Sea (Antarctica) aboard the icebreaker N.B. Palmer. The cruise was relevant to our investigations of the role of mesoscales in cross-shelf exchanges in Antarctica. We successfully surveyed mesoscale eddies (both cyclonic and anticyclonic) over the shelf of the Ross Sea.
Sept. 2011: I presented a seminar at the CCPO, Old Dominion University.
July 2011: I participated to the Coastal Ocean Modeling Gordon Conference with a poster on ocean-ice shelves interactions in Antarctica. That was my second participation to these conferences, and the way people are allowed to interact with the speaker during his talk is just great (although it's probably more challenging for the speaker). You don't get that at AGU meetings.
July 2011: Michael Dinniman gave a talk on our investigations of ocean-ice shelves interactions at the UGG XXV General Assembly Earth on the Edge: Science for a Sustainable Planet in Melbourne, Australia.
14 June 2011: I gave a talk at the 2011 IGS/FRISP meeting held at Scripps. The talk was about our latest numerical experiments on the role of coastal troughs in the transport of ocean heat to ice shelves in western Antarctica. The meeting was highly stimulating and I came back with several exciting ideas. And La Jolla is definitely an amazing place...
13 May 2011: Josefino Comiso and others recently published a study on the variability and trends of sea ice in western and southern Antarctica. Ice extent is generally increasing in the southern hemisphere with the exception of the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas where a negative trend of -7% per decade is obtained for the period 1978-2008. These two seas correspond to the area I'm studying as a post-doc at CCPO. On shorter timescales, the data shows a huge drop in 2005 again in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas. Although there were similar events in the past (e.g. 1989) it is not clear if the ice has recovered since then.
28 April 2011: My ccpo email box has been unreliable over the past months, but I think I finally resolved the issues. If you sent me a message during that period and never received an answer, please try again; this time I should get it...
April 2011: June will be a busy month. First I'll be presenting results from my postdoc on Antarctic ice shelves at the IGS / FRISP 2011 meeting. Then I am moving to Mount Holyoke College (not in Japan, but Massachusetts) for the 2011 Coastal Ocean Modeling workshop.
February 2011: As a follow-up to the previous entry, our own manuscript entitled What is the Fate of the River Waters of Hudson Bay?, submitted to the same special issue, is now in press and available on the journal website.
January 2011: Journal of Marine Systems is preparing a special issue on Hudson Bay with Robie Macdonald and Zou Zou Kuzyk as guest editors. I am particularly eager to read two of the articles submitted to that issue: Atmospheric Forcing of Sea Ice in Hudson Bay during the Spring Period, 1980-2005 by Klaus Hochheim et al. (Univ. Manitoba), and another one on remote observations of SST by Pierre Larouche and Peter Galbraith (Canada's DFO). Klaus has notably examined the relative vorticity of sea ice and its connection with the wind, something I've been waiting for since a long time.
January 2011: I'm currently reading Discrete Inverse and State Estimation Problems With Geophysical Fluid Applications by Carl Wunsch. As he wrote in the preface, it is essentially a second edition of its former book The Ocean Circulation Inverse Problem but in a more accessible form. I bought Inverse Modeling of the Ocean and Atmosphere by Andrew Bennett a few years ago, but I found it overly focused on operational oceanography and data assimilation. The book by Wunsch is more general and describes several applications of inverse methods in physical oceanography.
November 2010: Eos recently published (Vol.91, no 45, 9 Nov. 2010) a short summary of the summer school on Ocean-Ice Sheets Interactions that I attended earlier this year.
November 2010: The New York Times recently had an article on the melt of the Greenland Glacier. While it is not as focused as the one in Rolling Stone magazine I mentioned earlier, it's still a valuable coverage that's worth reading. The article is on open access on the NY Times website (just follow the link).
November 2010: I am working part-time on the completion of a manuscript featuring an idealized model of Hudson Bay (from the name of the great explorer Henry Hudson, the same that appears in the American classic Rip Van Winkle, and who gave the name to Hudson River near NY). I've been able to gather lots of new and historic observations, and use them for comparison with the model results. I plan to submit the manuscript in the next months to Atmosphere-Ocean, a journal that published several key papers on the oceanography of Hudson Bay, Labrador Sea, and Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
November 2010: In my spare time I read Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. It's a series of interviews with 15 top programmers in widely different fields (notably Donald Knuth and Ken Thompson). The interviews include several surprising, shocking statements: what is often considered “good programming practice” (reusable code, OOP) is openly criticized. The chapter with the great lady from IBM, Fran Allen, is the most relevant to my science work. In apparent contradiction with the current evolution of Fortran, she advocates for implicit parallelization performed by the compiler rather than explicit parallel constructs.
October 23rd 2010: Graduation! I completed the train ride between Norfolk and Rimouski (Québec) to receive my PhD diploma in Oceanography. On my way I visited New York for the first time, and had a glimpse of why Billie Holliday sang Autumn in NY with such an inspired voice...
October 1st 2010: I recently presented a poster about my work on ocean-induced melting in Antarctica at the 2010 WAIS Workshop. Interesting sessions, nice people, great location (deep into the wild Pennsylvania; I took a nice walk in the woods). Good to be able to talk with scientists such as Robert Bindschadler. Good also to see that glaciologists are well aware of the role the ocean can play in the melt of ice sheets---makes my work much easier.
October 1st 2010: Don't miss the last issue from Rolling Stone magazine (30 September 2010) that has a great article on the melt of the Greenland and Antarctica glaciers. It includes excerpts from interviews with Adrian Jenkins, Robert Bindschadler, David Holland... If you missed it, back issues are available from the Rolling Stone web page.
September 6th 2010: I'll be missing the 2010 Fall AGU Meeting, but participating at the 2010 WAIS Workshop. I am working on my presentation right now.
July 12th 2010: New affiliation! I am now a post-doc research associate at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography (CCPO) in Norfolk, Virginia. The NSF-funded project is on Ocean-Ice Shelves Interactions in Antarctica, under the supervision of Dr.John Klinck.
June 21th 2010: I am back from the 2010 ACDC summer course on Ocean-Ice Sheets interactions... I learned a lot, and particularly enjoyed the lectures from Adrian Jenkins (BAS) and David Battisti (U.Wash.)!
May 19th 2010: I'm working on minor revisions to my Ph.D. thesis before the final submission.
May 17th 2010: I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis in Oceanography at ISMER-UQAR! It is entitled Seasonal and Interannual Variability of the Freshwaters in Arctic Seas: The Case of Hudson Bay.