Bourassa, M. A. (2006). Satellite-based observations of surface turbulent stress during severe weather. Atmosphere-Ocean Interactions , 2 , 35–52.
Bourassa, M. A., S. T. Gille, and C. A. Clayson. (2010). Surface Fluxes: Challenges for High Latitudes: Workshop report from the U.S. CLIVAR High Latitudes Surface Flux Working Group. U.S. CLIVAR Variations , 8 (1), 7,14.
Bourassa, M. A., & Gille, S. (2008). U.S. CLIVAR working groups on high latitude surface fluxes. U.S. CLIVAR Variations , 6 (1), 8–11.
Morey, S. L., Wienders, N., Dukhovskoy, D. S., & Bourassa, M. A. (2018). Impact of Stokes Drift on Measurements of Surface Currents from Drifters and HF Radar. In American Geophysical Union (Vol. Fall Meeting).
Abstract: Concurrent measurements by surface drifters of different configurations and HF radar reveal substantial differences in estimates of the near-surface seawater velocity. On average, speeds of small ultra-thin (5 cm) drifters are significantly greater than co-located drifters with a traditional shallow drogue design, while velocity measurements from the drogued drifters closely match HF radar velocity estimates. Analysis of directional wave spectra measurements from a nearby buoy reveals that Stokes drift accounts for much of the difference between the velocity measurements from the drogued drifters and the ultra-thin drifters, except during times of wave breaking. Under wave breaking conditions, the difference between the ultra-thin drifter velocity and the drogued drifter velocity is much less than the computed Stokes drift. The results suggest that surface currents measured by more common approaches or simulated in models may underrepresent the velocity at the very surface of the ocean that is important for determining momentum and enthalpy fluxes between the ocean and atmosphere and for estimating transport of material at the ocean surface. However, simply adding an estimate of Stokes drift may also not be an appropriate method for estimating the true surface velocity from models or measurements from drogued drifters or HF radar under all sea conditions.
Armstrong, E. M., Bourassa, M. A., Cram, T., Elya, J. L., Greguska, F. R., III, Huang, T., et al. (2018). An information technology foundation for fostering interdisciplinary oceanographic research and analysis. In American Geophysical Union (Vol. Fall Meeting).
Abstract: Before complex analysis of oceanographic or any earth science data can occur, it must be placed in the proper domain of computing and software resources. In the past this was nearly always the scientist's personal computer or institutional computer servers. The problem with this approach is that it is necessary to bring the data products directly to these compute resources leading to large data transfers and storage requirements especially for high volume satellite or model datasets. In this presentation we will present a new technological solution under development and implementation at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for conducting oceanographic and related research based on satellite data and other sources. Fundamentally, our approach for satellite resources is to tile (partition) the data inputs into cloud-optimized and computation friendly databases that allow distributed computing resources to perform on demand and server-side computation and data analytics. This technology, known as NEXUS, has already been implemented in several existing NASA data portals to support oceanographic, sea-level, and gravity data time series analysis with capabilities to output time-average maps, correlation maps, Hovmöller plots, climatological averages and more. A further extension of this technology will integrate ocean in situ observations, event-based data discovery (e.g., natural disasters), data quality screening and additional capabilities. This particular activity is an open source project known as the Apache Science Data Analytics Platform (SDAP) (https://sdap.apache.org), and colloquially as OceanWorks, and is funded by the NASA AIST program. It harmonizes data, tools and computational resources for the researcher allowing them to focus on research results and hypothesis testing, and not be concerned with security, data preparation and management. We will present a few oceanographic and interdisciplinary use cases demonstrating the capabilities for characterizing regional sea-level rise, sea surface temperature anomalies, and ocean hurricane responses.
Zheng, Y., Bourassa, M. A., & Dukhovskoy, D. S. (2018). Upper-Ocean Processes Controlling the Sea Surface Temperature in the Western Gulf of Mexico. In American Geophysical Union (Vol. Fall Meeting).
Abstract: This study examines the upper-ocean processes controlling the mixed layer temperature in the western Gulf of Mexico (GOM) through estimating the contributing terms in the heat equation, with an emphasis on eddies' role. The major heat contributing terms for the upper GOM were estimated using two ocean reanalysis datasets: an eddy-resolving HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) and a Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA). Analysis of net surface heat fluxes from four datasets reveals that the long-term mean net surface heat flux cools the northern GOM and warms the southern GOM. Two regions are focused for analysis: an eddy-rich region where LCEs are energetic, and the southwestern Gulf where eddy activity is relatively weak and the features of near surface temperature differ from the eddy-rich region. An eddy-rich region in the western GOM is defined based on the eddy kinetic energy derived from satellite sea surface heights. The long-term mean horizontal heat advection causes a weak warming over most of the eddy rich region, partly attributed to the flow-temperature configuration that the long-term and seasonally mean flow is nearly parallel to the corresponding mean isotherms. By contrast, the temporal mean vertical heat advection causes a strong warming in the eddy rich region, partly balancing the cooling caused by net surface heat flux. The temporal mean eddy heat flux convergence in the western GOM, whose positive and negative values are not small at some locations, appears heterogeneous in space, resulting in a small term for the western GOM when area averaged. The persistent warm water in the southwestern Gulf is primarily caused by the net warming from net surface heat flux rather than from eddies and heat advection.
Jacob, J. C., Armstrong, E. M., Bourassa, M. A., Cram, T., Elya, J. L., Greguska, F. R., III, et al. (2018). OceanWorks: Enabling Interactive Oceanographic Analysis in the Cloud with Multivariate Data. In American Geophysical Union (Vol. Fall Meeting).
Abstract: NASA's Advanced Information System Technology (AIST) Program sponsors the OceanWorks project to establish an integrated data analytics center at the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC). OceanWorks provides a series of interoperable capabilities that are essential for cloud-scale oceanographic research. These include big data analytics, data search with subsecond response, intelligent ranking of search results, subsetting based on data quality metrics, and rapid spatiotemporal matchup of satellite measurements with distributed in situ data. The software behind OceanWorks is being developed as an open source project in the Apache Incubator Science Data Analytics Platform (SDAP – http://sdap.apache.org). In this presentation we describe how OceanWorks enables efficient, scalable, interactive and interdisciplinary oceanographic analysis with multivariate data.
Bourassa, M. A. (2001). Tehuantepec wind and pressure changes associated with tropical cyclones. In 11th Conference on Interactions of the Sea and Atmosphere, Amer. Meteor. Soc., San Diego, CA, USA (pp. 27–28).
Hilburn, K. A., Bourassa, M. A., & O'Brien, J. J. (2002). Development of scatterometer-derived research-quality surface pressure fields for the Southern Ocean . Orlando, FL: AMS.
Bourassa, M. A., Hughes, P. J., & Smith, S. R. (2008). Surface Turbulent Flux Product Comparison. Flux News , 5 , 22–24.
