McWilliams, a professor of oceanography in UCLA's department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, is the principal investigator for this research project. The team also includes Nicolas Gruber, assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, Keith Stolzenbach, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and seven other research scientists.

"We are not looking at a single question, but a whole system," says McWilliams. "We try to fit together all the various pieces to see how a regional coastal system works and how regional and global systems influence each other."

The team began studying coastal regions off the North American West Coast (NAWC) about five years ago and has been running simulations on NCSA's Origin2000 supercomputer for about three years, using several hundred thousand hours of compute time each year. Most recently, the researchers began generating simulations of circulations, ecosystems, and the geochemistry of the entire Pacific basin and then scaling down those simulations to examine conditions specific to the NAWC. The work promises to shed light on how very large-scale phenomena, such as the periodic warming of the sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific known as El Niño Southern Oscillation, come to be. It will also show how more localized currents and conditions influence each other.

According to McWilliams, the work tends to be done in pieces. A simulation might model carbon cycles and show their relationship to phytoplankton blooms, for example. Another might illustrate sediment circulation. The team looks at these pieces of the whole and puts them together to understand the bigger picture. The goal is to create an accurate model of the NAWC regional system using both ROMS and data from sensors and sampling.

Access Online | Posted 3-25-2003