2003 Coastal Ocean Modeling Gordon Conference

Gordon Research Conferences, East Greenwich RI

Investigators

Abstract

Support is requested for the 2003 Gordon Research Conference on Coastal Ocean Modeling. The funds requested will offset travel and conference fee costs of invited speakers and special requests from students and postdoctoral fellows, for long-distance travel. This conference is devoted to the understanding and prediction of processes occurring in the Coastal Ocean. Many important phenomena in the coastal ocean are either highly site-specific, or nonlinear, or both, and invoke a blend of coupled physical, chemical, and biological processes. What is novel today is the scope and complexity of the simulations which are of interest to governmental, industrial, and scientific communities, and these topics are the subject of massive new data campaigns and large community partnerships aimed at marshalling theory, experiment, and simulation toward scientific resource management. Understanding the scientific use of simulations is an added focus of this Conference. The complementary Coastal Ocean Circulation GRC is focused on coastal ocean circulation dynamics and related process studies. It is also held quadrennially (1997, 2001, 2005, - - -). The Coastal Ocean Modeling GRC is focused on numerical modeling on a regional scale where multiple processes and space-time scales exist and interact. Again, it is held quadrennially (1999, 2003, 2007, - - -). Thus, these two related but different GRCs are held in alternate biennia. The program committees are structured to complement each other. In 2003, six themes will be emphasized: Operational Forecasting, Data Assimilation, Shelf-Ocean Interactions, Physical/Biological Coupling, Lagrangian Methods, and Turbulence Closure Schemes. A Program Committee drawn from private and state universities, and scientific agencies is broadly representative of the research world. There are 35 senior people that have agreed to attend as the leadership corps, giving presentations and/or organizing sessions. The broader impacts of the proposed conference include the seeding of new fundamental ideas and approaches across the multidisciplinary scientific landscape; the closing of the apparent gap between observational and theoretical science via operational data-assimilative modeling; the enabling of operational systems within agencies devoted to scientific resource management; and the co-mixing of young students and scholars in the field with their established senior counterparts, across institutional boundaries of university, governmental agency, and private sector.