SCOR Working Group 129

Deep Ocean Exchanges with the Shelf

Chair(s)
John Johnson (UK) and Vice-Chair: Piers Chapman (USA)
Other Full Members
Isabel Ambar (Portugal), Jan Backhaus (Germany), Hu Dunxin (China-Beijing), Takeshi Matsuno (Japan), Wajih Naqvi (India), Alex Orsi (USA), Gordon Swaters (Canada), and Olga Trusenkova (Russia)
Associate Members
Kenneth Brink (USA), Xavier Durrieu de Madron (France), John Middleton (Australia), Pedro Monteiro (South Africa), and Jonathan Sharples (UK)
Terms of Reference

  1. Synthesize the state of the science and make recommendations for future research related to the following topics:

    • Processes due to shelf waves, internal tides, shelf break upwelling and sinking, eddies and filaments, storms and extreme events that produce effects over time scales of weeks to one or two years;
    • Transport over the shelf and shelf break of riverine and estuarine input of sediment and fresh water (this aspect includes the Arctic and Antarctic coastal zones, but does not include investigating the sources of sediment and fresh water on the shelves);
    • Dissipation of tidal motion along the continental margins on time scales of hours to days;
    • The physical controls of chemical and biological fluxes between the shelf and the open ocean that can affect the ecology of such regions;
    • Cascading and deep water formation; and
    • Coupled physical-chemical-biological models, generally at local to regional scales, that have a more realistic description of the exchanges at the shelf edge.

  2. Determine where further observational programmes (using improved technology) are needed to improve understanding of shelf break processes and to provide help with the formulation of more realistic models of the fluxes between the shelf and the deep ocean;

  3. Serve as an international forum for oceanographers to discuss current research on the interaction between the coastal zone and the deep ocean, by using the services and membership database provided by IAPSO;

  4. Foster collaboration between developed and developing countries that have interest in the shelf zone; limited-area models are required to help scientists in countries that do not have access to large computers; and

  5. Produce a comprehensive, published final report incorporating the latest results on the above topics.  This report will be in a form of a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal or a book by a major publisher.

Approved
October 2006
Financial Sponsors
NSF, SCOR, IAPSO
Meetings

  1. 10-11 July 2007 in Perugia, Italy

  2. 6-8 October 2008 in Cape Town, South Africa

    Workshop Photos
     Report from Meeting

    Presentations from Meeting

  3. 20-23 July 2009 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Publications