GFI/BCCR Seminar | Tor Eldevik: Spiral eddies, an anecdotal review
Hovedinnhold
Tor Eldevik (GFI, UiB / Bjerknes)
Spiral eddies, an anecdotal review
Abstract
At the sixth flight of the space shuttle Challenger, in 1984, its payload specialist was an oceanographer. Paul Scully-Power's main instrument of observations was a Hasselblad camera. And observing ocean from space, Scully-Power concluded that spiral eddies – O(10km) cyclonic surface ocean spirals – are "perhaps the most fundamental entity in ocean dynamics". The seminar will be an anecdotal review about 1) how an original copy of the Challenger mission report came into my hands to become the closest thing I ever had to a research plan for my PhD project; 2) how theories for the spirals subsequently evolved; and 3) what may be the state of current understanding of spiral eddies. In between I will celebrate and also try to connect the centenaries of GFI and Walter Munk as well as the 80th birthday of my PhD supervisor Kristian Dysthe.
Short biography
Tor leads the Polar Climate Research Theme of the Bjerknes Centre. His research interests include
+ the role of the northern seas in climate - past, present, future
+the interannual to decadal predictability of climate
+the Arctic-Atlantic thermohaline circulation
+Barents Sea ice cover, climate, and ecosystem
+mesoscale dynamics, incl. “spiral eddies” using theory, observations, and models
Tor has been involved in the Bjerknes Centre since he started working as a climate researcher at NERSC in 2001 following completing his dr.scient. in applied mathematics. Tor has been at GFI since 2010, and is a professor in in large-scale oceanography/decadal climate dynamics.
