This paper discusses several open questions relevant to the dynamics of oceanic planetary waves, to their effects on phytoplankton and to their role in climate change. These questions have been prompted by the last two decades of satellite observations of planetary waves – initially with altimeters but now also with SST and ocean colour – which have also stimulated significant advances in our t...

Receiver functions derived from teleseismic body waves recorded by ocean-bottom seismometers on the southern East Pacific Rise reveal shear waves converted from compressional waves at the mantle discontinuities near 410- and 660-kilometer depth. The thickness of the mantle transition zone between the two discontinuities is normal relative to the global average and indicates that upwelling benea...

Article history: Received 7 December 2010 Accepted 10 December 2010 Available online 17 December 2010 Communicated by V.M. Agranovich We study the spectra of the Peregrine soliton and higher-order rational solutions of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE), which we use as a model of the rogue waves in optics and in the deep ocean. We show that these solutions have specific triangular spect...

The most successful equations for the modeling of ocean wave phenomena are the free– surface Euler equations. Their solutions accurately approximate a wide range of physical problems from open–ocean transport of pollutants, to the forces exerted upon oil platforms by rogue waves, to shoaling and breaking of waves in nearshore regions. These equations provide numerous challenges for theoretician...

Forecasting of ocean wave heights, with warning time of a few hours or days, is necessary in planning many operation-related activities in the ocean. Such information is currently derived by numerically solving the differential equation representing wave energy balance. The solution procedure involved is extremely complex and calls for very large amounts of meteorological and oceanographic data...

[1] Why do ocean waves break? Understanding this important and obvious property of the ocean surface has been elusive for decades. This paper investigates causes which lead deep-water two-dimensional initially monochromatic waves to break. Individual wave steepness is found to be the single parameter which determines whether the wave will break immediately, never break or take a finite number o...

Prediction is a central goal and a yet-unresolved challenge in the investigation of oceanic rogue waves. Here we define a horizon of predictability for oceanic rogue waves and derive, via extensive computational experiments, a statistically converged predictability time scale for these structures. We show that this time scale is a function of the sea state (i.e., severity of the ambient ocean w...

During a Type-I burst, the turbulent deflagation front may excite waves in the neutron star ocean and upper atmosphere with frequencies, ω ∼ 1 Hz. These waves may be observed as highly coherent flux oscillations during the burst. The frequencies of these waves changes as the upper layers of the neutron star cool which accounts for the small variation in the observed QPO frequencies. In principl...

The basic element of Lighthill's "sandwich model" of tropical cyclones is the existence of "ocean spray," a layer intermediate between air and sea made up of a cloud of droplets that can be viewed as a "third fluid." We propose a mathematical model of the flow in the ocean spray based on a semiempirical turbulence theory and demonstrate that the availability of the ocean spray over the waves in...

S U M M A R Y The recent discovery that the seismic normal modes of the Earth are excited to a nearly constant level during seismically quiet days (‘the hum of the Earth’) has lead to much speculation as to what drives the observed background in the absence of large earthquakes. Other authors have shown that the hum cannot be explained by the many small earthquakes occurring each day and have a...