In collaboration with colleagues at UVic and the Institute of Ocean Sciences, I have a significant number of projects suitable for graduate students at the MSc or PhD levels. MSc projects involve either numerical modelling/theory or data analysis, PhD topics ideally will involve both.
I am jointly appointed in SEOS and Physics and Astronomy. Students have the option of applying through either department. The physics degrees require more physics courses to be taken, the SEOS degree more earth-system-science courses.
While I want grad students, I strongly advise students to cast a wide net and discuss projects with other potential supervisors. There is a wide variety of approaches and methods and finding a good match for your personal tastes is important.
Applying for an NSERC is always a good idea, particularly if you are an A-student with research experience. Applications are usually due in early October, the year before you apply for grad school.
All students should apply to UVic by Feb 15th to be considered for a UVic award.
These are opportunistic, in that when we can get ship time or participate in a project a data set is made available. Currently, I have datasets from:
Other data sets will be collected in the near future.
Observational theses are less specified than numerical theses, as the ocean does not always yield observational results in a predictable manner. The steps are usually:
where the last integrative step usually requires many observations and often benefits from theoretical and numerical insight.
Observational projects are challenging, but extremely rewarding.
I believe numerical process studies motivated by observations are a very powerful tool to improve our understanding of the ocean. Student projects are a little easier to specify in advance, and I do so here.
Grad student Wendy Callendar found that the tides produce headland vortices around Cape St. James in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Interestingly, on certain tidal phases these eddies coalesced into larger mesoscale eddies that then spun off into the interior of the ocean. A project would be to idealize Wendy's work and
The oceanographic community is very interested in where mixing takes place in the ocean. One source of energy for mixing is the internal tide, but we still do not have a plausible energy budget for the internal tide. One energy sink for internal waves is when they hit continental shelves. The goal here would be to run idealized numerical simulations of this process to:
Turbulent mixing impacts the strength of the global overturning circulation and the density stratification of the ocean. However, the turbulent mixing also depends on the stratification. So there is a potential climate feedback that has not been explored. The goal here would be to
In the open ocean, away from topography, the dominant way that turbulence is generated is via the somewhat random breaking internal waves. The problem is analogous to whitecapping on the sea surface, but without the wind's direct forcing. Our understanding of the rate of this process is arrived at by tracing "test waves" through an emperical continuum of internal waves, modifying the waves until they are of a small enough scale to break. The continuum for these waves, however, often excludes well-known frequency peaks such as those driven by the tides. The question here is how does the ray tracing of the waves change as these peaks are made more prominent (if at all).
Jody Klymak - jklymak@uvic.ca