Main research interests:

We have 'Ocean Climate' initiatives supported by NSF and NASA, and NOAA. Check my 'Output page' for more. The Physical Oceanography Research link and the other Research links on the main page provide more climate information.

Separate from this is an NSF funded program of basic studies in geophysical fluid dynamics, centering on our lab. The GFD lab is extremely well-equipped both for research and teaching. In addition we have an 1100 square-foot teaching lab which we use for larger classes.

An interesting spin-off of doing this kind of work is a parallel understanding of other worlds! You will see references from the Geology&Geophysics group and Biological Oceanography Group relating to life on Europa and new life forms in sea-floor hot vents. We physicists also deal in the circulations of the planets and stars...particularly the great gas giants.

Jupiter possesses more mass than all the other planets combined. In a sense it is a failed star. Its cloud bands are jet-like zonal circulations and its Great Red Spot is perhaps the largest storm in the Solar System. Our laboratory simulations (see figure below) provide a model for these phenomena, which has been deeply explored by Dr. Gareth Williams at Princeton. We had a special issue of Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences on the topic of jet streams and jet-like ocean currents, in early 2007.

Vorticity is a spin-like quantity which is active throughout oceans and atmospheres. Appearing in the fluid atmosphere and oceans, it is 'inherited' from the rotation of the planets themselves. Below is a vortex-like fractal, a polar vortex produced in our lab by vorticity stirring due to Rossby waves, and a vortex sheet roll-up in the Weddell Sea (240km x 360km, made visible by ice).

Teaching and research are both essential components of graduate student life at UW. The links to courses here show examples where students fulfill their TA requirement with a serious involvement in the course (not just grading papers!).

Oceans, atmospheres, climate science take physics or chemistry or biology 'out-of-doors'. Chaos, singular perturbation theory, fractals, and solitons are all examples in which natural, environmentmal science provided the root discovery that grew into a major branch of physics or mathematics. Thus, the intellectual flow is not always from the 'mother sciences' to the 'environmental sciences' but has gone in both directions. Read 'What is Oceanography' on the GFD Lab web page.








I have worked in active seagoing programs in the Labrador Sea for the past two decades studying climate change and the physics of deep convection. Icebergs there symbolize the interaction of heat, salt and ice in the general circulation (though sea-ice and fresh melt-water from land are more important to the upper ocean). Working with Prof. Charlie Eriksen and his group we have launched Seagliders in the northern Atlantic from October 2003 to November 2009 to observe ocean climate, deep convection and the flows communicating between Arctic and Atlantic. We established ties with the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk (formerly Gothab), the capital of Greenland. This was our base for glider launches. (You can see more about Seagliders on my GFD lab website under 'OUTPUTS'.) More recently we have worked with Faroe Islanders to launch and recover Seagliders between Iceland and Norway. This remarkable community on the wind-swept yet beautiful Faroes has become part of our scientific 'family' with many visits in both directions. The gliders on the Iceland-Faroe Ridge hhave given us 18,000 profiles from top to bottom of the ocean during the past three years of deployments, more data than has been collected there in all of the past.

Equally, we have developed strong ties and frequent exchange visits with the University of Bergen, Norway, where oceans and climate are vital to the economy as well as being scientifically interesting.

We have an initiative with NASA to use the altimeter satellites TOPEX/Poseidon and JASON to map climate change and circulation in the high latitude oceans. This remarkable instrument uses a laser beam to sense the height of the sea surface over a few kilometers. See a paper in Science magazine on Earth Day 2004 about the slowing of the Atlantic Ocean circulation (Hakkinen & Rhines, Science vol 304, p. 555-559), or later papers on my GFD lab website.

I must mention courses we have been teaching over the past decade on the changing global environment. The scientific knowledge and skills gathered in researching oceans, atmospheres and climate prepare one well for this complex matter. In the UW undergraduate Honors program for example, a course on Oceans and the Global Environment uses natural and human-related energy cycles to enter into the challenging and compelling matter of global change. In another undergraduate course taught with the Program on the Environment, Earth, Air, Water: the Human Context we have centered on hands-on laboratory experiments as a way to introduce non-science major undergrads to critical environmental issues. This link is for the 2004 year. Our graduate students participate in teaching activities like these as TA's, regularly.

Ironically we also have discovered a new form of altimetry for laboratory experiments that simulate ocean and atmosphere circulations and waves. This uses the water surface on our rotating platform as if it were a telescope mirror with imperfections (its mean shape is a paraboloid). (Isaac Newton invented the reflecting telescope in 1672, and at times telescope makers have used a rotating fluid as a base on which to cast their parabolic mirrors.) The images below show this 'optical altimetry' revealing Rossby waves and inertial waves produced by flow over a mountain, in a 1 meter-diameter cylinder of water. This experiment models the high latitude atmosphere or ocean, with the North Pole at the center, as if you are looking down from space. The mountain is where the tight spiral pattern appears. The field visualized is the height variation of the water surface, a few micrometers in amplitude, which accurately shows the pressure and geostrophic flow lines.

Visit the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory: manuscripts, lecture abstracts, essays, stills and animations of laboratory experiments, links with other GFD groups

Other interests:

• Link to our fluids lab teaching effort
• A course teaching undergraduates environmental science in the UW Honors Program, using the laboratory: see Energy and Environment: Humans and Nature. Last taught in spring 2012.
• Another undergraduate course taught with the Program on the Environment, Earth, Air, Water: the Human Context. This link is for the 2004 year, for the Spring 2005 version taught by William Wilcock and Eric Lindahl go here.
• You can get a feel for graduate work in physical oceanography by reading my FAQ essay on the Oceanography home page, www.ocean.washington.edu/2004/about/FAQ.html and visiting the class webpages (under Courses on the Web linked above). A couple of earlier courses not shown there are: are: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics-I and a summer field course at UW's Friday Harbor Laboratories in the San Juan Islands, Coastal and Estuarine Geophysical Fluid Dynamics.
• Classical guitar.
• Building kayaks