Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts
Institute of Ocean Sciences, British Columbia
U. S. Office of Naval Research
The intent of the meeting is to identify
impacts of energetic nonlinear internal waves on all disciplines
of oceanography. Three disciplines come to mind as a result of recent
work and are included in the title.
Ocean internal solitary waves occur in vastly different oceanic regimes
where their roles may vary
widely. Broad categories of regime are
1. Continental slopes and broad continental
shelves
2. Straits, sills, and isolated topography
3. Open ocean
The importance of isolated, energetic, nonlinear waves on such issues
as bottom turbidity, diapycnal
heat flux, nutrient transfer, long-range acoustic propagation and radar
imaging has been firmly
demonstrated. Each of these issues is sensitive, or insensitive, to
details of the internal waves in a
particular fashion which we seek to establish or generalize.
Identification of newly exposed or merely theorized influences of internal
solitary waves is a goal of
the meeting. Identification of outstanding questions within established
internal solitary wave research
topics is another goal. For these reasons, attendees will be encouraged
to expose questions that remain
in their research.
Colleagues are being invited from a broad spectrum of fields: Wave dynamics,
acoustics, biology,
optics, remote sensing, bottom processes, physical oceanography and
engineering.
The presentations will be broken up into short groups, each with a moderator.
The moderators
will summarize and comment on the talks, and then introduce a question
and discussion period.
The moderators will be from one of the other research specialities,
to encourage new ideas.
[ Due to the unexpectedly high ratio of positive responses to the invitations,
in actuality we
had 42 20- to 30 minute lectures, with only about 2 hours of discussion
forum. The discussions
were often punctuated with 5-minute lectures . ]