SIO Airborne Flight (9/21/17)

SIO Melville lab had our last day of flying the MASS system yesterday. Again we experienced clear skies and windy conditions which provided good signal for our sensor suite. We flew an additional calibration flight after the science flight to wrap things up and spent the day today backing up data and packing up to head home after a successful … Read More

Pt Purisma radar now online

Our radar at Pt Purisma now has a real time site. Both sites can now be accessed from one link: http://research.engr.oregonstate.edu/haller/innershelf/osu-radar.php Hopefully this is of some use as work gets done further to the south.

Rip currents @Guadalupe

Graduate students Alex and Spencer have been capturing drone footage of rip currents along the beach by our radar site and comparing optical versus radar observations. Above left is a snapshot of one. Rip neck and rip head are evident by their entrained sediment. Rip head is particularly interesting  with its intermediate scale wave breaking and smaller scale instabilities along … Read More

Oceanographers use this one weird trick to see internal waves!

Click-bait headline aside, we did see some fairly astounding internal wave characteristics in combing through the airborne IR data today. Specifically, Melissa and our pilot Dave flew a final transect along a bore front about 5 miles offshore Pt Sal and saw this: The view shows an IR snapshot of a portion of an internal wave packet, looking perpendicular to … Read More

Photos from around Pt Sal from the air.

I wanted to share a few quick images of things we saw from the air today (it’s pretty amazing!). Times and general locations are indicated below. Looking northwest from Pt. Sal out to the Sally Ride (1324 PDT). Bloom and rips just north of Mussel Pt (1406 PDT). Sally Ride transiting inshore of an internal bore front (1423 PDT)