My involvement with high latitude oceanography began during my Ph.D thesis at the University of Washington (UW), where I was advised by Prof. Peter Rhines. I was very fortunate to have been involved in the "Bravo" mooring project, a joint effort between UW, the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO), and other groups, and later in the extensive Labrador Sea Deep Convection Experiment. Initial results from the mooring project (paper "iii" on this web site) proved to contain tantilizing first glipses of phenomena that were subsequently observed in much greater detail (iv and v).

The bulk of my time at the University of Washington involved a comprehensive census of coherent eddies in the Labrador Sea using both a multi-year mooring dataset as well as the TOPEX / Poseidon altimeter, and was accomplished with the help of many collaborators. In particular, the mooring dataset combined the UW / BIO Bravo mooring with the Institut für Meereskunde interior Labrador Sea mooring array. After a considerable amount of energy developing new methods for the detection and analysis of eddy features, the net result of this work was a detailed portait of remarkably intricate structure and variability of the Labrador Sea eddy field (v).

Following the completion of my Ph.D. thesis, I worked with Dr. Ellen Lettvin at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory on a problem related to the interaction of gravity-capillary waves. After re-examining and extending some classical results on the asymptotic behavior of the simle harmonic oscillator (vi), we determined the theoretical third-order statistics of the sea surface and sea surface slope implied by weakly nonlinear gravity-capillary wave interactions. The latter work is of practical interest in radar backscatter calculations and also sheds light on process of energy transfer among wave triads.

I also have an ongoing interest in the development of new tools for the analysis of oceanographic time series. As an undergraduate at Yale University, I was involved in an early application of wavelet analysis to a climatic time series (i) and helped develop a "multi-wavelet" approach (ii) which has led to a number of interesting applications in the seismology literature. At the moment, I am working on a paper which examines the multiple ways a complex-valued time series may be separated into two complimentary functions of time and frequency (iiiv), generalizing the concept of "rotary spectra" to a family of such partitionings.