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Sea Surface Structure |
| Physical Oceanography |
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| Figure 1. A raft mounted with optical apparatus. |
The picture of dancing sun glitters on the sea surface can always bring us wonderful memories. Sun glitters are the images of the Sun reflected by the wavy sea surface. A dramatic colorful sun glitter image would be seen if there were multiple suns with different color in the sky. Based on the same principle, colorful sea surface pictures can be captured with an optical light coding apparatus mounted on a raft in the California coastal water. A group of researchers at Scripps are studying detailed fine sea surface structures with the optical imaging techniques. They are able to measure the surface shapes and the flow structures near the sea surface. From these observations, they are pondering the dynamics of air-sea interchanges, such as the exchange of gas, heat, and momentum, through a wavy sea surface. This still is an outstanding question for us to quantify the coupling between the ocean and atmosphere that affects our climate.
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| Figure 2. A sea surface picture in which surface gradient is color coded. |
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Physical Oceanography at Scripps