Course catalog listing

ADVANCE: Sea-going oceanography

Course number: 63-713

Lecturer: Eleanor Frajka-Williams

Course type: Elective core course

Learning outcomes: Students will have an in-depth knowledge of the principles of oceanographic instruments and measurement. Students will be able to apply standard processing and quality control to raw oceanographic data, and understand how the processing choices relate to the measurement principles. Further, students will compute, compare and evaluate different approaches for making oceanographic calculations, e.g. from ship-based measurements or moored platforms, and different instrument types. Students will gain a general understanding of and apply strategies for designing a physical oceanographic field program.

Contents: In this course, we will go over the fundamentals of oceanographic measurements for seagoing physical oceanography. This will include going over the principles behind the standard measurement sensors (CTD, ADCP, current meters, etc) and then seeing how the measurement principles affect our treatment of the data and errors. This course is primarily computer-based, and you will gain experience using manufacturer’s software from standard instruments for data handling and quality control, processing in Matlab or Python, applying data correction principles, and using the data to evaluate an oceanographic phenomenon.

At the end of the course, you should have a basic familiarity with the onboard processing and treatment of physical oceanographic datasets, so that if you go to sea you will understand approaches to treating and processing data.

Formal/recommended prerequisites:

Formal: “Introduction to Physical Oceanography” Recommend: Prior experience with a programming language (Matlab or Python), basic knowledge in maths and statistics.

Workload/credit points: 28h lecture, 28h seminar/tutorial, with additional 124h of self-study. Credit points 6.

Exam: Requirement for registration: Completion of exercises. Exam: Usually report and presentation.

Reference semester: 2 or 4

Frequency of offer: Every other year.

Literature: Emery and Thomsen (2014) Data analysis methods in physical oceanography. Others to be announced in the course.