Daniel F. CarlsonHelmholtz-Zentrum Hereon | HZG · Department of Radar Hydrography
Daniel F. Carlson
PhD
About
58
Publications
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Introduction
I study how ocean currents transport "stuff"- macroalgae, ice, oil, fish larvae, and plastics. I strive to add an element of reality to the field of oceanography, which is reliant on numerical models and satellite data. I develop new methods and sensors to expand our observational capabilities. I use unoccupied robotic platforms (autonomous surface vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, and unoccupied aerial vehicles), ship-based and moored instrumentation, and satellite data.
Additional affiliations
October 2010 - May 2013
November 2008 - September 2010
Publications
Publications (58)
The coastal ocean represents an important global carbon sink and is a focus for interventions to mitigate climate change and meet the Paris Agreement targets while supporting biodiversity and other ecosystem functions. However, the fate of the flux of carbon exported from seaweed forests—the world’s largest coastal vegetated ecosystem—is a key unkn...
Research, monitoring, and management of marine and aquatic ecosystems often require surface water samples to measure biogeochemical and optical parameters. Traditional sampling with a
boat and several personnel onboard can be labor-intensive and safety requirements limit sampling activities in high-risk environments. This paper describes the Naval...
Anthropologists have long been fascinated by the strikingly similar adaptations of circumpolar cultures as well
as their puzzling differences. These patterns of diversity have been mapped, studied, and interpreted from many perspectives
and often at different social and spatiotemporal scales. While this work has generated vast archives of legacy...
Despite growing attention on the contribution of macroalgae to carbon cycling and sequestration (blue carbon), more observational data is needed to constrain current estimates. In this study, we estimate the floating macroalgal carbon flux within and beyond a large sub-Arctic fjord system, Nuup Kangerlua, Greenland, which could potentially reach ca...
Changes in the distribution of coastal macrophytes in Greenland, and elsewhere in the Arctic are difficult to quantify as the region remains challenging to access and monitor. Satellite imagery, in particular Sentinel-2 (S2), may enable large-scale monitoring of coastal areas in Greenland but its use is impacted by the optically complex environment...
The number of sailboats venturing northward to places like Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, and the Northwest Passage has increased in recent years. Sailboats are affordable, sustainable, and agile research platforms. Sailboats obviously cannot replace research vessels but they can be used to conduct detailed process studies that are difficult to cond...
Vertical mixing of upper water masses in Arctic fjords is important for circulation and transport of nutrients and heat. However, the distribution of turbulent mixing is poorly known. Here we present hydrographic and microscale turbulence measurements from six fjords in Northwestern (69°N–75°N) Greenland. Water mass distributions showed the presenc...
The 2017 Mission Arctic Citizen Science Sailing Expedition to Western Greenland
Predicting the distribution of oil, buoyant plastics, flotsam, and marine organisms near the ocean surface remains a fundamental problem of practical importance. This manuscript synthesizes progress in this area during the time of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI; 2012–2019), with an emphasis on the accumulation of floating material in...
Freshwater discharge from glaciers is increasing across the Arctic in response to anthropogenic climate change, which raises questions about the potential downstream effects in the marine environment. Whilst a combination of long-term monitoring programmes and intensive Arctic field campaigns have improved our knowledge of glacier–ocean interaction...
Meltwater runoff from the Greenland Ice Sheet changes water levels in glacial lakes and can lead to glacial lake outburst flooding (GLOF) events that threaten lives and property. Icebergs produced at Greenland's marine terminating glaciers drift into Baffin Bay and the North Atlantic, where they can threaten shipping and offshore installations. Thu...
The accelerated melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet has been linked to a sudden increase in the presence of warm subsurface coastal water in west Greenland. Yet pathways of warm coastal water along the entire west Greenland coast have remained largely unstudied. Here we present the first, near‐synoptic hydrographic observations at both the continental...
Icebergs account for approximately half of the freshwater ux from the Greenland Ice Sheet and they can impact marine ecosystems by releasing nutrients and sediments into the ocean as they drift and melt. Parameterizing iceberg uxes of nutrients and sediments to fjord and ocean waters remains a difficult task due to the complexity of ice-ocean inter...
The VIMOA project and archaeological heritage in the Nuussuaq Peninsula of north-west Greenland - Matthew J. Walsh, Pelle Tejsner, Daniel F. Carlson, Leendert Vergeynst, Kasper U. Kjeldsen, Friederike Gründger, Hanjing Dai, Steffen Thomsen, Erik Laursen
The marine robotics sector has experienced explosive growth in the past two decades that has been fueled by widespread adoption of a range of unoccupied platforms across nearly all ocean domains, including ocean exploration, research, education, industry, and defence. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unoccupied underwater vehicles, and remote...
The oceans provide numerous ecosystem services to society as a whole and data-driven analytics (e.g., “big data”) have become critical components of scientific research, economic development, policy and governance, security, and even recreation. The utility and efficacy of big data approaches in the marine domain depend strongly on the quality, qua...
This outreach video made by the very talented Caspar Haarløv (casparhaarloev.dk) shows the Ice Drone in action during its first field tests near Nuuk, Greenland in January 2019.
The ecological impacts of meltwater produced by icebergs and sea ice in the waters around Greenland are poorly understood, due in part to limited observations. Current field sampling methods are resource and labor-intensive, and not without significant risk. We developed a small, unoccupied, and robotic platform to retrieve ice samples, while simul...
We present an analysis of ocean surface dispersion characteristics, on 1–100-m scales, obtained by optically
tracking a release of O (600) bamboo plates for 2 h in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Under sustained 5–6ms21
winds, energetic Langmuir cells are clearly delineated in the spatially dense plate observations. Within 10 min
of release, the plate...
The ecological impacts of meltwater produced by icebergs and sea ice in the waters around Greenland are poorly understood, due in part to limited observations. Current field sampling methods are resource and labor-intensive, and not without significant risk. We developed a small, unoccupied, and robotic platform to retrieve ice samples, while simul...
Freshwater discharge from glaciers is increasing across the Artic in response to anthropogenic climate change, which raises questions about the potential downstream effects in the marine environment. Whilst a combination of long-term monitoring programmes and intensive Arctic field campaigns have improved our knowledge of glacier-ocean interactions...
Bathymetry measurements are needed in shallow, near-shore environments to estimate the potential distribution of macroalgae and seagrass, which contribute to oceanic carbon sinks in Greenland and other Arctic locations. Additionally, ocean current observations near icebergs and marine-terminating glaciers are necessary to estimate their melt rates....
Oil slicks and sheens reside at the air-sea interface, a region of the ocean that is notoriously difficult to measure. Little is known about the velocity field at the sea surface in general, making predictions of oil dispersal difficult. The Ship-Tethered Aerostat Remote Sensing System (STARSS) was developed to measure Lagrangian velocities at the...
Ocean currents impact the transport and mixing of almost everything in the ocean: from fish larvae, to microplastics, to oil spills. Ocean currents move a great deal of heat around the globe and play an important role in Earth’s climate system. In the Arctic, currents may play a dominant role in recent mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet, bringi...
Understanding the role of ocean currents in the recruitment of commercially and ecologically important fish is an important step toward developing sustainable resource management guidelines. To this end, we attempt to elucidate the role of surface ocean transport in supplying recruits of European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) to the Gulf of Manfredo...
Formed in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon event, the largest accidental marine oil spill, the Consortiumfor Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment (CARTHE) focused on understanding the physical processes controlling the transport of material from a deep blowout all the way to the coast. Even though CARTHE was initi...
Drone autopilots are naturally suited for real-time iceberg tracking as they measure position and orientation (pitch, roll, and heading) and they transmit these data to a ground station. We powered an ArduPilot Mega (APM) 2.6 with a 5V 11 Ah lithium ion battery (a smartphone power bank), placed the APM and battery in a waterproof sportsman’s box, a...
Drone autopilots are naturally suited for real-time iceberg tracking as they measure position and orientation (pitch, roll, and heading) and they transmit these data to a ground station. We powered an ArduPilot Mega (APM) 2.6 with a 5V 11 mAh lithium ion battery (a smartphone power bank), placed the APM and battery in a waterproof box, and tossed t...
Understanding the role of ocean currents in the recruitment of commercially and ecologically important fish is an important step toward developing sustainable resource management guidelines. To this end, we attempt to elucidate the role of surface ocean transport in supplying recruits of European sardine (Sardinus pilchardus) to the Gulf of Manfred...
In this paper, a high-frequency (HF) coastal radar network is described, which is established and maintained by the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) for the measurement of surface current velocities in the Gulf of Manfredonia, located in the semienclosed Adriatic Sea (Mediterranean Sea), during 20...
The freshwater content of the Arctic Ocean and its bordering seas has recently increased. Observing freshening events is an important step towards identifying the drivers and understanding the effects of freshening on ocean circulation and marine ecosystems. Here, we present a 13-year (2003-2015) record of temperature and salinity in Young Sound-Ty...
Two major episodes of seagrass mortality have occurred in Florida Bay in the past 30 years: The first occurred between 1987-91 and the second began in 2015. In both episodes, dense beds of turtle grass (Thalassia testudinum) were decimated. Elevated water temperature and hypersalinity have been implicated as contributing factors in both mortality e...
Icebergs and bergy bits makes up a significant component of the total freshwater flux from the Greenland Ice Sheet to the ocean. Observations of iceberg trajectories are biased toward larger icebergs and, as a result, the drift characteristics of smaller icebergs and bergy bits are poorly understood. In an attempt to fill this critical knowledge ga...
Visual ship transect surveys provide crucial information about the density, and spatial distribution of floating anthropogenic litter in a basin. However, such observations provide a ‘snapshot’ of local conditions at a given time and cannot be used to deduce the provenance of the litter or to predict its fate, crucial information for management and...
Expendable Ice Trackers (EXITE; Carlson et al., 2017) were deployed on 9 bergy bits in Godthåbsfjord in August 2016. EXITE construction and the deployment of 7 trackers near Kangiata Nunata Sermia (KNS) are described in Carlson et al. (2017). These trajectories correspond to
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Lagrangian particle tracking and Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS) analysis tools aid in the studies of fluid flow and are especially helpful in understanding the role of transport in marine ecosystems. However, most existing particle tracking and analysis tools operate in conjunction with a specific model and/or require execution in multiple pr...
Surface drifters and virtual particles are used to investigate transport between seven coastal regions in the central and southern Adriatic Sea to estimate the degree to which these regions function as a network. Alongshore coastal currents and cyclonic gyres are the primary circulation features that connected regions in the Adriatic Sea. The histo...
The Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) established a High Frequency (HF) Coastal Radar Network for the measurement of the velocity of surface currents in coastal seas. The network consists of four HF radar systems located on the coast of the Gargano Promontory (Southern Adriatic, Italy). The network...
The general aim of this paper is to present a possible multidisciplinary approach to the problem of connectivity among marine protected areas (MPAs) describing some of the mechanisms and vectors that control the dispersal of propagules among spatially distributed marine communities of MPAs in the Southern Adriatic Sea. A joint approach is described...
A HF radar system has been operating since May 2013 in the Southern Adriatic between the Gargano Cape and the Manfredonia Gulf. The system, that has been tested and complemented with drifter launchings during three experiments, produces maps of surface ocean velocities at 2 km resolution every hour. These data support fishery management as well as...
The Lagrangian circulation in the southern Adriatic Sea is investigated to determine how currents affect population connectivity. Lagrangian transport pathways are identified using a combination of GPS-tracked surface drifters and HF radar surface current observations. This study has been carried out under the framework of the CoCoNET and SSD PESCA...
The stratification in the Northern Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba follows a well-known annual cycle of well-mixed conditions in winter, surface warming in spring and summer, maximum vertical temperature gradient in late summer, and erosion of stratification in fall. The strength and structure of the stratification influences the diverse coral reef ecosystem a...
While most large-scale studies of population connectivity use numerical ocean model output to compute statistics of thousands of virtual particles, large uncertainties persist as models have limited spatial resolution and often do not reproduce observed ocean variability. Furthermore, scale-dependent dispersion on the surface ocean remains an impor...
Seagrass communities serve as essential habitat for fish and shellfish, and recent research indicates that they can play a significant role in reducing ocean acidification. As part of a collaborative project funded by the NASA ROSES program and administered by the NASA UAV Collaborative, we collected hyperspectral imagery of seagrass beds and measu...
Moored automatic mobile profilers (MAMPs) provide cost-effective profiles of density, velocity,
and water quality (i.e. fluorescence, nutrients, dissolved oxygen) at high temporal and vertical resolution
over extended durations in a variety of marine environments and are an important component of modern
ocean observation systems. While several diff...
The spatial and temporal variabilities of alongshore semi-diurnal tidal
currents in the northern Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba are examined using
long-term (10 month) observations of velocity measured by acoustic
Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) deployed in deep, offshore waters and
in the shallow coastal zone over the period October 2008 to July 2009.
Semi...
We present a method for estimating the upper bound of the horizontal eddy diffusivity using a non-stationary Lagrangian stochastic
model. First, we identify a mixing barrier using a priori evidence (e.g., aerial photographs or satellite imagery) and using
a Lagrangian diagnostic calculated from observed or modeled spatially non-trivial, time-depend...
Progressive vector diagrams (PVDs) have been used to estimate transport in the coastal ocean from point measurements of velocity time series, although they strictly only approximate true particle trajectories in regions where the currents are spatially uniform. Currents in most coastal regions vary significantly in both space and time, making coast...
Progressive vector diagrams (PVDs) have been used to estimate transport in the coastal ocean from point measurements of velocity time series, although they strictly only approximate true particle trajectories in regions where the currents are spatially uniform. Currents in most coastal regions vary significantly in both space and time, making coast...
TOPEX/Poseidon/Jason1 (T/P/J) sea surface height (SSH) measurements along tracks 91 and 15, crossing the wide West Florida continental shelf (WFS), were used to estimate seasonal across-shelf SSH gradients. SSH gradients and the knowledge that geostrophic flow approximately follows the isobaths enable estimation of the seasonal along-isobath geostr...
The 2004 and 2005 hurricane season provided two unique opportunities to evaluate the effects of post-hurricane nutrient enrichment of the West Florida Shelf (WFS) and HAB initiation and maintenance. Multidisciplinary research cruises began approximately 10 days after both Hurricanes Charley and Wilma, the former occurred during a period without a H...
Unusually cold sea surface temperatures (SST) were recorded on the Atlantic coast of Florida from Mayport to Ft. Pierce during the summer of 2003 (June – August). The abnormally low SST stunned sea turtle hatchlings and caused at least one documented fish kill. Analysis of wind data from the Climate Diagnostic Center and National Data Buoy Center b...
An acoustical path length modulation (PLM) method is currently being developed to measure phase velocity with a resolution of 1 ppm. Experimentally this is accomplished by forming a resonant cavity with a moving reflector attached to a piezoelectric bimorph. The change in the path length is determined by measuring capacitance between the (moving) e...
A method is being developed to measure phase velocity with high resolution at cryogenic temperatures. Integral to this method is a variable length acoustic cavity. A piezoelectric bimorph serves as a moveable boundary with sub-nanometer scale movement to vary the path length of the cavity. A capacitance bridge is used to measure the position of the...
Questions
Questions (3)
I am interested in the use of mobile apps to present environmental data and scientific findings to the public but first I want to know if anyone has developed methods to evaluate knowledge transfer and engagement via mobile apps. I'm familiar with Discipline Based Education Research (DBER) but my cursory internet search didn't find any such evaluations of mobile apps. I hope to use results of previous studies, if they exist, to guide app development to maximize chances of success. Thanks in advance!
Most bureaucracy is pointless and only serves the personal insecurities of the bureaucrats, or is perhaps a knee-jerk reaction by attorneys to avoid liability. I can see indirect impacts of bureaucracy on climate science and climate solutions: As our bureaucratic load increases, the time that we can devote to meaningful, impactful research decreases. But, what about the energy consumed by servers that run so-called "productivity software" (looking at you, SAP)? What about all the pointless forms that are printed and signed (still? in the digital age?) and stored away in filing cabinets? What about all the travel of pointless bureaucrats who spend public money to get together to make our lives more complicated? If it's not painfully obvious, my hypotheses are: 1) 99% of bureaucracy is pointless; 2) Bureaucracy has significant direct and indirect impacts on climate. How can we test these hypotheses?
Can anyone point me to peer-reviewed studies of the rise of university administration and its effects on: 1) research productivity in general and 2) productivity of postdocs and early career researchers? Based on my own experiences and anecdotal evidence from my colleagues, I am inclined to think that the adoption of the business model and the subsequent increase in bureaucratic hurdles has only negative impacts. My efforts to locate peer-reviewed studies on this subject haven't turned up much but I am probably using the wrong search terms.