Research Interests
My research
has focused on the kinematics and dynamics of the world’s coastal ocean which has led to projects on the
east and west coasts of the United States, the arctic, South
America, east Africa and Australia. Looming large in this
effort have been processes at the edge of the broad continental
shelf of the Middle Atlantic Bight and the Gulf of Maine that
control the exchange of mass and material between the deep ocean
and shelf occurs. Investigations of these areas started
with hydrographic and moored observations and have expanded to
include bottom-mounted and ship-based ADCPs, and close coordination
with biological and chemical measurement programs. In
this process, the application of ADCPs to biological issues led
to the development of techniques to infer zooplankton biomass
acoustically on the same time and space scales as those of the
physical parameters. As the research progressed through
several coastal ocean programs (SEEP-I, -II, OMP, and GLOBEC)
there was an increasing realization of the importance of long-term
climatic fluctuations and their impact on the shelves. This
was a central issue in the Georges Bank GLOBEC program in which
the physical processes controlling the development of larval
cod and haddock and their zooplankton prey were investigated
in light of both local and far-field forcing. The focus
on climate-scale processes of the coastal and adjacent waters
also spurred the development of a long-term upper ocean current
observation program using an ADCP on a volunteer observing ship,
the container vessel Oleander that makes weekly trips between
New York and Bermuda. The expertise gained in the Oleander
VOS program has led to an ambitious program to apply some of
the same techniques to monitor the northern limb of the meridional
over-turning circulation as it crosses the Iceland to Scotland
ridge from a high-speed ferry.
Recently and
in collaboration with Professor Robert Wilson, I have begun to
study the circulation of the coastal lagoons of southern Long Island
using a combination of numerical modeling and observations. Coastal
lagoons exist all along the U.S. east and Gulf coasts where they
play a vital role in the regional ecology and are increasingly
impacted by anthropogenic processes. The Long Island coastal
lagoons offer a unique opportunity to study these processes and
the modeling which include tidal, buoyancy, atmospheric and bottom
ground water forcing offer a particularly efficient means of examining
how these areas have and will change in response to man’s
activities. Currently, we are looking at the impact that
breaches in Fire Island might have on the circulation and salinity
distribution in Great South Bay and how bathymetric changes have
altered the circulation and sediment transport in Jamaica Bay.
Recent and Selected
Publications
Flagg,
C.N., M. Dunn, D-P. Wang, T.Rossby and R. Benway, 2005.
A study of the currents of the outer shelf and upper slope from
a decade of shipboard ADCP observations in the Middle Atlantic
Bight. Journal of Geophysical Research, in press.
Rossby,T., C.N.
Flagg and K. Donohue, 2005.
Interannual variations in upper-ocean transport by the Gulf
Stream and adjacent waters between New Jersey and Bermuda.
J. Mar, Res., 63,203-226.
Codispoti, L.A., C.N.
Flagg and V. Kelly, 2005. Hydrographic
conditions during the 2002 SBI Process Experiments. Deep-Sea
Research II, in press.
Smith P.C.,
C.N. Flagg, R. Limeburner, C. Fuentes-Yaco, C. Hannah ,R.C.
Beardsley, and J. Irish, 2003. Scotian shelf cross-overs during
winter/spring 1999. Journal of Geophysical Research,
108, 8013, doi:10.1029/2001JC001288.
Flagg,
C.N. and M. Dunn, 2003. Characterization of the mean and seasonal
flow regime on Georges Bank from five years of shipboard ADCP
data. Journal
of Geophysical Research, 108, 8002, doi:10.1029/2001JC001257.
Flagg,
C.N., L.J.Pietrafesa, and G.L. Weatherly, 2002. Springtime
hydrography of the southern Middle Atlantic Bight and the onset
of seasonal stratification. Deep-Sea Research II, 49/20, pp 4297-4329.
Kim, H–S., Flagg,
C.N., and Howden, S.D., 2001. Northern
Arabian Sea variability from TOPEX/Poseidon altimetry data, An
extension of the JGOFS/ONR shipboard ADCP study. Deep Sea
Research, 48, 1069-1096..
Flagg,
C.N. and H–S. Kim, 1998. Upper ocean currents in
the northern Arabian Sea from ADCP measurements during the 1994–1996
JGOFS program. Deep Sea Research, 45, 1917–2000.
Flagg,
C.N.,
G.Schwartze, E. Gottlieb, and T. Rossby, 1997. Operating an
acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) aboard a container
vessel. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic
Technology, 15, 257–271.
Flagg,
C.N.,
R.W. Houghton, and L.J. Pietrafesa, 1994. Summertime thermocline/salinity
maximum intrusions in the Mid–Atlantic
Bight. Deep Sea Research II, 41, 325–340.
Flagg,
C.N.,
C.D. Wirick, and S.L. Smith, 1994. The interaction of phytoplankton,
zooplankton, and currents from 15 months of continuous data
in the Mid–Atlantic Bight. Deep Sea Research
II, 41, 411–436.
Houghton,
R.W., C.N. Flagg, and L.J. Pietrafesa, 1994. Shelf–slope
water frontal structure, motion, and eddy heat flux in the southern
Middle Atlantic Bight. Deep Sea Research II, 41, 273–306.
Flagg,
C.N.,
and S. L. Smith, 1989. On the use of the RDI acoustic Doppler
current profiler to measure zooplankton abundance. Deep
Sea Res. 36,3, 455–474.
Flagg,
C.N.,
1988. Internal waves and mixing along the New England shelf–water/slope–water front. Continental Shelf
Res. 8, 737–756.
Flagg, C.N.,
R.L. Gordon, and S.C. McDowell,1986. Current and hydrographic
measurements on the continental shelf and slope of the western
equatorial Atlantic. J. Phys. Oceano. 16, 1412–1429.
|
