SPURS Education and Outreach: Webinars

Ocean Thinking: Changes in Latitude

It may be easy to think about studying the ocean by looking at a small section of it, but the reality is that water is constantly on the move. While highlighting his own research within the SPURS area, Julius Busecke will demonstrate how the atmosphere affects the water cycle both on land and in the ocean, and how the movement of seawater plays a crucial role in our understanding global ocean circulation.

Webinar Archive

You can watch a video of the webinar below. Below the video is Julius' interactive concept maps so that you may follow along with the presentation.

Click here for a transcript of the Q&A portion of this video (PDF, 84KB).

View related videos:

	The Turbulence Cascade [vimeo, 01:08]
	Optimizing Research Methods [vimeo, 01:21]
	Salinity Balance is Like a Bank Account [vimeo, 01:19]
	Getting the Salinity Right [vimeo, 01:33]

Concept Map: How Does the Atmosphere Affect Land?

This webinar featured a series of three interconnected maps. The first map explores how the atmosphere and land interact, and how there can be desert-like regions both on land and in the ocean. Moving over to the ocean, the second map discusses how the atmosphere's wind, the rotating earth and the ocean surface interact to create the mixed layer and to setup ocean circulation. The final map illustrates the lateral movement of water from the subtropics to the tropics, which affects the salinity in the SPURS research area.

You can explore the first map in the window below, or save it to your own CLIMB account by clicking on the light blue wrench in the upper left corner and selecting Copy Map to My Maps. To view these maps as PDFs click here (PDF, 276 KB).

This concept map forms the basis of Julius' presentation. Hover over the concepts to uncover additional resources, or save this map to your own CLIMB account by clicking on the light blue wrench in the upper left corner and selecting "Copy Map to My Maps".

Applicable Next Generation Science Standards

Influence of Engineering, Technology, and Science on Society and the Natural World Crosscutting Concept: New technologies can have deep impacts on society and the environment, including some that were not anticipated. Analysis of costs and benefits is a critical aspect of decisions about technology (HS-ESS2-2).

[HS-ESS2-2] Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth’s surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth’s systems.

Disciplinary Core Idea: Variations in density due to variations in temperature and salinity drive a global pattern of interconnected ocean currents (MS-ESS2-6).

[MS-ESS2-6] Develop and use a model to describe how unequal heating and rotation of the Earth cause patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation that determine regional climates.

About the Presenter

Julius Busecke is a Graduate Research Assistant at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Kiel, Germany in 2010.

SPURS Blog

Slicing the Ocean [NASA Earth Observatory]

Julius introduces us to the towed CTD instrument, known as SeaSoar, that will be used on the Sarmiento portion of the SPURS cruise

Endeavor Update 13-04-06 [NASA Earth Observatory]

This posts talks about the deployment of some of the SeaSoar instruments that Julius mentions in his talk, as well as finding the pockets of freshwater that he described

Nights on a Research Vessel [NASA Earth Observatory]

Julius Busecke describes what a night shift is like on the SPURS cruise

Resources

Density: Sea Water Mixing & Sinking [NASA Aquarius]

Temperature and salinity help govern the density of seawater, which is a major factor controlling the ocean's vertical movements and layered circulation

Salt of the Earth: Ocean Atmosphere Circulation Helps Moderate Climate [NASA Aquarius]

Things that happen now will still be manifest hundreds of years in the future