Sea Level Variations and Ocean Dynamics in the Aleutian Islands.

• Main Author: Agnew,D C
• Other Authors: CALIFORNIA UNIV SAN DIEGO LA JOLLA INST OF GEOPHYSICS AND PLANETARY PHYSICS
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1984
• Subjects: Meteorology; Physical and Dynamic Oceanography; *Sea level; Bering Sea; North Pacific Ocean; Aleutian Islands; Ocean tides; Barometric pressure; Variations; Energy; Flux(Rate); Pacific; Aleutian Island
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA139421; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA139421

The overall purpose of this project was to study ocean dynamics along the Aleutian Island chain, which is the boundary between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. These two bodies of water communicate through a number of straits (usually called passes) which are shallowest at the eastern end (a list is given in Favorite, 1967). The specific goal of this project was to use pre-existing data sets, particularly long time series of sea level and meteorology, to understand something of the physical oceanography of the area. Particular questions of interest included: Tidal dynamics: how do the tides propagate along the chain and through the passes? Why is there an anomalously small S2 tide in the Bering Sea? What is the flux of tidal energy into the Bering Sea, and how is it distributed along the chain? Other sea level variations: how does atmospheric forcing affect low-frequency sea level changes? Are other low-frequency signals present that could be correlated with shelf waves or with changes in currents such as the Alaskan Stream (Favorite et al., 1976) near the island chain? Is there any nonlinear interaction between tides and sea level? Can any pattern of meteorology be associated with the harbor seiches observed in some of the tide records? This report presents what results were obtained: in all cases they are preliminary rather than final.