Richard Signell

United States Geological Survey | USGS · Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center

Water level in semi-enclosed bays, landward of barrier islands, is mainly driven by offshore sea level fluctuations that are modulated by bay geometry and bathymetry, causing spatial variability in the ensuing response (transfer). Local wind setup can have a complementary role that depends on wind speed, fetch, and relative orientation of the wind...

The traditional flow of coastal ocean model data is from High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers to the local desktop, or to a file server where just the needed data can be extracted via services such as OPeNDAP. Analysis and visualization are then conducted using local hardware and software. This requires moving large amounts of data across the i...

Water level in semi-enclosed bays, landward of barrier islands, is mainly driven by offshore sea level fluctuations that are modulated by bay geometry and bathymetry, causing spatial variability in the ensuing response (transfer). Local wind setup can have a secondary role that depends on wind speed, fetch, and relative orientation of the wind dire...

This paper outlines strategies that would advance coastal ocean modelling, analysis and prediction as a complement to the observing and data management activities of the coastal components of the US Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS®) and the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). The views presented are the consensus of a group of US-based re...

The Community for Data Integration (CDI) represents a dynamic community of practice focused on advancing science data and information management and integration capabilities across the U.S. Geological Survey and the CDI community. This annual report describes the various presentations, activities, and outcomes of the CDI monthly forums, working gro...

A system of barrier islands and back-barrier bays occurs along southern Long Island, New York and in many coastal areas worldwide. Characterizing the bay physical response to water level fluctuations is needed to understand flooding during extreme events and evaluate their relation to geomorphological changes. Offshore sea level is one of the main...

Digital catalogs of ocean data have been available for decades, but advances in standardized services and software for catalog searches and data access now make it possible to create catalog-driven workflows that automate—end-to-end—data search, analysis, and visualization of data from multiple distributed sources. Further, these workflows may be s...

Work over the last decade has resulted in standardised web services and tools that can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of working with meteorological and ocean model data. While many operational modelling centres have enabled query and access to data via common web services, most small research groups have not. The penetratio...

Work over the last decade has resulted in standardized web-services and tools that can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of working with meteorological and ocean model data. While many operational modelling centres have enabled query and access to data via common web services, most small research groups have not. The penetratio...

According to the Integrated Coastal Ocean Observation System (ICOOS) Act of 2009 the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS®) Enterprise extends across 17 federal agencies and 11 regional associations and includes numerous actors from within those organizations. One of the primary functions IOOS provides is a Data Management and Communication...

Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA) is currently supporting a multiscale, multi-resolution modeling subsystem for the US Southeast coastal waters to deliver model data and products for coastal resource and emergency response managers and other users. The models that are currently supported in the SECOORA foot print incl...

Numerical modeling has emerged over the last several decades as a widely accepted tool for investigations in environmental sciences. In estuarine research, hydrodynamic and ecological models have moved along parallel tracks with regard to complexity, refinement, computational power, and incorporation of uncertainty. Coupled hydrodynamic-ecological...

Cysts of Alexandrium fundyense, a dinoflagellate that causes toxic algal blooms in the Gulf of Maine, spend the winter as dormant cells in the upper layer of bottom sediment or the bottom nepheloid layer and germinate in spring to initiate new blooms. Erosion measurements were made on sediment cores collected at seven stations in the Gulf of Maine...

An infrastructure for earth science data is emerging across the globe based on common data models and web services. As we evolve from custom file formats and web sites to standards-based web services and tools, data is becoming easier to distribute, find and retrieve, leaving more time for science. We describe recent advances that make it easier fo...

[1] Strong and strategic collaborations among experts from academia, federal operational centers, and industry have been forged to create a U.S. IOOS Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed (COMT). The COMT mission is to accelerate the transition of scientific and technical advances from the coastal and ocean modeling research community to improved oper...

A Gulf of Mexico performance evaluation and comparison of coastal circulation and wave models was executed through harmonic analyses of tidal simulations, hindcasts of Hurricane Ike (2008) and Rita (2005), and a benchmarking study. Three unstructured coastal circulation models (ADCIRC, FVCOM, and SELFE) validated with similar skill on a new common...

A two-equation turbulence model (one equation for turbulence kinetic energy and a second for a generic turbulence length-scale quantity) proposed by Umlauf and Burchard [J. Marine Research 61 (2003) 235] is implemented in a three-dimensional oceanographic model (Regional Oceanographic Modeling System; ROMS v2.0). These two equations, along with sev...

Wind speeds and directions measured in June, July, and August, 2009 at 5 locations separated by up to about 5 km on the Skagit tidal flats (near La Conner, WA) are compared with predictions of a triple-nested Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model with 1.3-km resolution. The model predicts the observed diurnal fluctuations of the wind speeds (bi...

The life cycle of Alexandrium fundyense in the Gulf of Maine includes a dormant cyst stage that spends the winter predominantly in the bottom sediment. Wave-current bottom stress caused by storms and tides induces resuspension of cyst-containing sediment during winter and spring. Resuspended sediment could be transported by water flow to different...

Core Science Systems is a new mission of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that resulted from the 2007 Science Strategy, "Facing Tomorrow's Challenges: U.S. Geological Survey Science in the Decade 2007-2017." This report describes the Core Science Systems vision and outlines a strategy to facilitate integrated characterization and understanding of...

Coastal waters and lowlands of the U.S. are threatened by climate change, sea-level rise, flooding, oxygen depleted “dead zones”, oil spills and unforeseen disasters. With funding from U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS®), the Southeast University Research Association (SURA) facilitated strong and strategic collaborations among experts fr...

In order to monitor, describe and understand the marine environment, many research institutions are involved in the acquisition and distribution of ocean data, both from observations and models. Scientists from these institutions are spending too much time looking for, accessing, and reformatting data: they need better tools and procedures to make...

The U.S. GeoData 2011 was inspired by a joint NSF-USGS identification of the need to hear from the broader 'geo' community on a variety of data related matters. While increasing attention needed to be paid to full life cycle of data, in the process of preparing and scoping the workshop two other hot issues were identified: integration and citation,...

The use and exploitation of the marine environment in recent years has been increasingly high, therefore calling for the need of a better description, monitoring and understanding of its behavior. However, marine scientists and managers often spend too much time in accessing and reformatting data instead of focusing on discovering new knowledge fro...

In addition to academic partnerships, an efficient, effective, and sustainable EarthCube will require collaboration with government entities which have legislative mandates to maintain and provide access to scientific information and information systems that complement those created by NSF grantees. This white paper describes three bases for intera...

Core Science Systems is a new mission of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that grew out of the 2007 Science Strategy, "Facing Tomorrow's Challenges: U.S. Geological Survey Science in the Decade 2007-2017." This report describes the vision for this USGS mission and outlines a strategy for Core Science Systems to facilitate integrated characterizati...

The NOAA-led U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) have been collaborating since 2007 on advanced tools and technologies that ensure open access to ocean observations and models. Initial collaboration focused on serving ocean data via cloud computing - a key componen...

There is remarkable agreement in expectations today for vastly improved ocean data management a decade from now --capabilities that will help to bring significant benefits to ocean research and to society. Advancing data management to such a degree, however, will require cultural and policy changes that are slow to effect. The technological foundat...

The objective of our program is to investigate the far field subsurface and surface dispersal of different size classes of oil released from the Deepwater Horizon well. We use the Lagrangian transport model LTRANS, an open source model, to simulate the trajectories of oil droplets as they age over time. This Lagrangian approach incorporates the eff...

Wind speeds and direction measured during July and August, 2009, at 4 locations separated by up to about 10 km on the Skagit River tidal flats (near La Conner, WA) will be compared with predictions of a triple-nested Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model with roughly 400 m resolution. Correlations between both wind speeds and directions measure...

In the coastal zone, storms are one of the primary environmental forces causing coastal change. These discrete events often produce large waves, storm surges, and flooding, resulting in coastal erosion. In addition, strong storm-generated currents may pose threats to life, property, and navigation. The ability to predict these events, their locatio...

The national Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS®) is responsible for coordinating a network of people, resources, and technology to disseminate continuous data, information, models, products, and services made throughout our coastal waters, Great Lakes, and the oceans. There are many components of the IOOS—including government, academic, and p...

We discuss progress to date and plans for the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS®) Data Management and Communications (DMAC) subsystem. We begin by presenting a conceptual architecture of IOOS DMAC. We describe work done as part of a 3-year pilot project known as the Data Integration Framework and the subsequent assessment of lessons learned....

by Richard Peter Signell.

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution September 1989 The dynamics of shallow tidal currents and tide-induced dispersion are investigated around coastal headlands that have alongshore length scales that are...

Model data interoperability for the United States Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS ®) was initiated with a focused one year project. The problem was that there were many regional and national providers of oceanographic model data; each had unique file conventions, distribution techniques and analysis tools that made it difficult to compare m...

The Adriatic Sea is regularly subjected to strong Bora wind events from the northeast during winter. The events have a strong effect on the oceanography in the Adriatic, driving basin-scale gyres that determine the transport of biogeochemical material and extracting large amounts of heat. The Bora is known to have multiple surface wind jets linked...

Oceanography is evolving from a shipbased expeditionary science to a distributed, observatory‐based approach in which scientists continuously interact with instruments in the field. These new capabilities will facilitate the collection of long‐term time series while also providing an interactive capability to conduct experiments using data streamin...

Insufficiently integrated data management and access systems are a major problem that data managers, scientists and users encounter when trying to serve, locate or use climate data. This situation is a reflection of technology management and decision-making strategies of the past that have tended to fragment data management, rather than to unify it...

The NOAA-led Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and the NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative Cyberinfrastructure Project (OOI-CI) are collaborating on a prototype data delivery system for numerical model output and other gridded data using cloud computing. The strategy is to take an existing distributed system for delivering gridded data...

Recent studies of sediment dynamics and clinoform development in the northern Adriatic Sea focused on winter 2002–2003 and provided the data and motivation for development of a detailed sediment-transport model for the area near the Po River delta. We used both idealized test cases and more realistic simulations to improve our understanding of seas...

Sorted grain-size features, also known as rippled scour depressions, are persistent cross-shore structures found in many nearshore environments, characterized by sharp gradients in grain size and gentle relief in the alongshore direction. The formation of these features is not completely understood, but self-organization and feedback have been prop...

The Gulf of Maine Ocean Data Partnership Modeling Committee has been developing a Model Interoperability Experiment in the Gulf of Maine built around the Climate and Forecast (CF-1.0) metadata standard. The goal is to allow scientists to issue common Matlab commands to retrieve geospatially referenced data, regardless of model type. Our starting po...

Sediment dispersal in the Adriatic Sea was evaluated using coupled three-dimensional circulation and sediment transport models, representing conditions from autumn 2002 through spring 2003. The calculations accounted for fluvial sources, resuspension by waves and currents, and suspended transport. Sediment fluxes peaked during southwestward Bora wi...

We are developing a three-dimensional numerical model that implements algorithms for sediment transport and evolution of bottom morphology in the coastal-circulation model Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS v3.0), and provides a two-way link between ROMS and the wave model Simulating Waves in the Nearshore (SWAN) via the Model-Coupling Toolkit. T...

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 113 (2008): C04004, doi:10.1029/2007JC004148. In this paper we present an application of a variational method fo...

Systematic improvements in algorithmic design of regional ocean circulation models have led to significant enhancement in simulation ability across a wide range of space/time scales and marine system types. As an example, we briefly review the Regional Ocean Modeling System, a member of a general class of three-dimensional, free-surface, terrain-fo...

Author Posting. © NATO Undersea Research Centre, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of NATO Undersea Research Centre for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Marine Systems 69 (2008): 86-98, doi:10.1016/j.jmarsys.2007.02.015. Despite numerous and regular improvements in underlying mod...

Author Posting. © Elsevier B.V., 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Marine Systems 69 (2008): 154-161, doi:10.1016/j.jmarsys.2007.02.013. In MREA and many other marine applications, it is common...

Fifteen bottom-mounted Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers were deployed from October 2002 through April 2003 in the northern Adriatic Sea. Average transport from the portion of the Western Adriatic Current (WAC) along the Italian slope was 0.1470 +/- 0.0043 Sv, punctuated by bursts of more than twice that amount during storm events. Monthly means w...

Blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate Alexandrium fundyense commonly occur in the western Gulf of Maine but the amount of toxin observed in coastal shellfish is highly variable. In this study, a coupled physical–biological model is used to investigate the dynamics underlying the observed A. fundyense abundance and shellfish toxicity in 1993 (a high to...

We present a case study of Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) data processing for long-term coastal deployments, using data collected by the Naval Research Laboratory and the NATO Undersea Research Centre from 14 trawl-resistant bottom moorings (BARNYs) during winter 2002/2003 across the northern Adriatic Sea. New methods were developed to ma...

The release of particulate-phase trace metals due to sediment resuspension has been investigated by combining erosion chamber experiments that apply a range of shear stresses typically encountered in coastal environments with a shear stress record simulated by a hydrodynamic model. Two sites with contrasting sediment chemistry were investigated. Se...

A two-way interacting high resolution numerical simulation of the Adriatic Sea using the Navy Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM) and Coupled Ocean/ Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS®) was conducted to improve forecast momentum and heat flux fields, and to evaluate surface flux field differences for two consecutive bora events during February 2...

More than 120 satellite-tracked drifters were deployed in the northern and middle Adriatic (NMA) Sea between September 2002 and November 2003, with the purpose of studying the surface circulation at mesoscale to seasonal scale in relation to wind forcing, river runoff, and bottom topography. Pseudo-Eulerian and Lagrangian statistics were calculated...

A winter oceanographic field experiment provided an opportunity to examine the atmospheric marine conditions over the northern Adriatic. Mean February winds are from a northeasterly direction over most of the Adriatic and a more northerly direction along the western coast. Wind speeds are fastest in jets over the NE coast during bora events and wea...

In coastal marine environmental modeling, it is common to have multiple models from various investigators and/or institutions running with different grids and utilizing a variety of data sets collected on multiple space and time scales. Techniques and tools are described for delivery of results from large multidimensional data sets, such as those f...

A three-dimensional numerical model for wave-induced circulation, sediment transport, and evolution of bottom morphology is being developed. The momentum equations governing the mean circulation have additional depth-dependent radiation stress terms generated by shoaling wave transformations (Mellor, 2003; 2005) and dissipation of surface rollers (...

High-resolution numerical simulations of the Adriatic Sea using the Navy Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM) and Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS) were conducted to examine the impact of the coupling strategy (one versus two way) on the ocean and atmosphere model skill, and to elucidate dynamical aspects of the coupled response....

The Gulf of Maine Coastal Current (GMCC), which extends from southern Nova Scotia to Cape Cod Massachusetts, was investigated from 1998 to 2001 by means of extensive hydrographic surveys, current meter moorings, tracked drifters, and satellite-derived thermal imagery. The study focused on two principal branches of the GMCC, the Eastern Maine Coasta...

Analyses of CTD and moored current meter data from 1998 and 2000 reveal a number of mechanisms influencing the flow along the western coast of Maine. On occasions, the Eastern Maine Coastal Current extends into the western Gulf of Maine where it takes the form of a deep (order 100 m deep) and broad (order 20 km wide) southwestward flow with geostro...

A numerical simulation of the circulation in the Gulf of Maine is compared with observations taken during the spring and summer of 1994, focusing on two distinct coastal current systems. The eastern Maine coastal current is well mixed out to approximately 50m depth, with the influence of tidal mixing extending to 100m depth. In contrast, the wester...

During winters, the northern Adriatic Sea experiences frequent, intense cold‐air outbreaks that drive oceanic heat loss and imprint complex but predictable patterns in the underlying waters. This strong, reliable forcing makes this region an excellent laboratory for observational and numerical investigations of air‐sea interaction, sediment and bio...

The quality of surface winds derived from four meteorological models is assessed in the semi-enclosed Adriatic Sea over a 2-month period: a global hydrostatic model ECMWF T511 (40 km resolution), a hydrostatic limited area model LAMBO (20 km), and two non-hydrostatic limited area models: LAMI (7 km) and COAMPS™ (4 km). These wind models are used to...

The plume advection hypothesis links blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate Alexandrium fundyensein the western Gulf of Maine (GOM) to a buoyant plume derived from river outflows. This hypothesis was examined with cruise and moored-instrument observations in 1993 when levels of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) toxins were high, and in 1994 when toxi...

: Several large research programs focused on the Adriatic Sea in winter 2002-2003, making it an exciting place for sediment dynamics modelers. Investigations of atmospheric forcing and oceanic response (including wave generation and propagation, water-mass formation, stratification, and circulation), suspended material, bottom boundary layer dynami...

The Adriatic Sea provides a setting for contrasting a range of sediment dispersal processes. The largest single source of sediment, the Po River, delivers an estimated 15 million tons of sediment annually, much during floods that last for several weeks. South of the Po, several rivers drain smaller catchments in the Apennine Mountains, delivering 3...

The western Adriatic coastal current (WACC) flows for hundreds of kilometers along the east coast of Italy at speeds of 20 to 100 cm/s. It is fed by the buoyancy input from the Po River and other rivers of the northern Adriatic Sea, with typical freshwater discharge rates of 2000 m**3/s. The Bora winds provide the dominant forcing agent of the WACC...

Observations in the Gulf of Maine, USA, were used to characterize the freshwater transport, temporal variability and dynamics of the western Maine coastal current. These observations included moored measurements, multiple hydrographic surveys, and drifter releases during April–July of 1993 and 1994. There is a strong seasonal signal in salinity and...