Particles in the Coastal Ocean Theory and Applications

The coastal ocean comprises the semi-enclosed seas on the continental shelf, including estuaries and extending to the shelf break. This region is the focus of many serious concerns, including coastal inundation by tides, storm surges or sea level change; fisheries and aquaculture management; water quality; harmful algal blooms; planning of facilities (such as power stations); port development and maintenance; and oil spills. This book addresses modeling and simulation of the transport, evolution and fate of particles (physical and biological) in the coastal ocean. It is the first to summarize the state of the art in this field and direct it toward diverse applications, for example in measuring and monitoring sediment motion, oil spills and larval ecology. This is an invaluable textbook and reference work for advanced students and researchers in oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, marine and civil engineering, computational science and environmental science.

Part I. Background: 1. The coastal ocean; 2. Drifters and their numerical simulation; 3. Probability and statistics – a primer; 4. Dispersion by random walk; 5. BCs, boundary layers, sources; 6. Turbulence closure; Part II. Elements: 7. Meshes: interpolation, navigation, and fields; 8. Particles and fields; Part III. Applications: 9. Noncohesive sediment – dense particles; 10. Oil – chemically active particles; 11. Individual-based models – biotic particles; Part IV. Appendixes.

Daniel R. Lynch is MacLean Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College and Adjunct Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He has published extensively on simulation methods in coastal oceanography. He co-founded the Gordon Research Conference in Coastal Ocean Modeling, was executive director of the Regional Association for Research on the Gulf of Maine, and served on the executive committee of the US GLOBEC Northwest Atlantic Program. He developed the Numerical Methods Laboratory at Dartmouth around the theme of interdisciplinary computational engineering and authored the textbook Numerical Solution of Partial Differential Equations for Environmental Scientists and Engineers (2005). He is co-editor of Professions and the Common Good (2006), a contributor to the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century (2008), and author of Sustainable Natural Resource Management for Scientists and Engineers (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
David A. Greenberg is a research scientist at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Bedford Institute of Oceanography. His research includes model development and application for tidal circulation and resonance, sediment transport, intertidal flooding, sea level rise, tidal power, biological productivity, and aquaculture. Major shelf areas he covers include the Fundy-Maine region, the Newfoundland shelf, the Scotian shelf, and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
Ata Bilgili is Associate Professor of Coastal and Ocean Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. His research includes the application of particle techniques to wind-dominated coastal systems, the optimization of particle-tracking methods on high-performance computing platforms, particle applications to sediment and water-quality problems, and simulation of intertidal inundation processes. His additional interests include unstructured mesh generation, environmental contingency planning for ports and harbors, and the advancement of ma