ERD has three research opportunities with the National Research Council, called Climate Change and Fisheries Populations, Climate and Eastern Ocean Systems, and Fisheries Oceanography. These opportunities are duplicated below and are rather broad in scope. Applicants are wise to contact an advisor to discuss ideas for a research proposal and to assure that the proposed research is consistent with the laboratory's research effort (further information on ERD's research is available on the homepage). Current topics of interest in the Fisheries Oceanography topic area include the following:

• Role of the ocean environment in fluctuations in west coast salmonids
  
• Remote sensing of west coast waters with particular interest in the Columbia River plume
  
• Large-scale variability in the North Pacific as it affects marine resources.

ADVISOR: Franklin Schwing  (Franklin.Schwing@noaa.gov);   (831) 648-9034

A number of commercially important fish populations respond to changes in environmental conditions on interannual and longer time scales. To relate physical variability to fluctuations in marine populations, we must understand how the ocean varies in space and time-particularly the primary patterns, sources, and mechanisms of interannual to decadal variability. We are investigating changes in the ocean on decadal scales, and are attempting to determine the physical mechanisms that lead to these changes. Our objective is to develop indices of environmental conditions that can be applied to fisheries recruitment and population dynamics problems. This is done by using traditional and innovative statistical methods to analyze historical environmental data sets such as the COADS, MOODS, WODB and the NCEP re-analysis. We also seek straightforward algorithms for the near-real-time estimation of important physical oceanic fields (e.g., transport, mixed layer depth, biologically effective upwelling) from readily available variables. The Associate will work with a team of scientists that are part of national climate research programs. These include the US GLOBEC Northeast Pacific program, investigating the role of climate change on marine populations in the productive ecosystems of the North Pacific Ocean, and the NOAA Fisheries and the Oceans (FATE) program, developing leading indicators of marine ecological change.

Climate and Eastern Ocean Systems

ADVISOR: R. Mendelssohn  (Roy.Mendelssohn@noaa.gov);   (831) 648-9029

The objective of this project is to study climate change and the possible effects of such change on marine resources in eastern boundary ocean systems. Research includes separating local from global variability in both oceanic and biological time series, looking for evidence of regime changes, and determining the socio-economic impact resulting from climate change. Emphasis is placed on comparing across ecologically similar eastern ocean systems to gain greater "degrees of freedom". We welcome statistical studies in developing methods for nonstationary spectral estimation, change-point problems in time series, nonlinear and nongaussian state-space models, factor estimation in state-space models, and hidden Markov changes. Easy access to worldwide surface and subsurface oceanographic data is also available, as well as extensive fisheries data bases from the various eastern ocean system regions.

Fisheries Oceanography

ADVISOR: Franklin B. Schwing (Franklin.Schwing@noaa.gov) ;   (831) 648-9034

The Environmental Research Division (ERD) conducts research to understand the effects of natural environmental variability on marine resource populations. ERD's broad research scope includes disciplines from physical oceanography, to fisheries biology, to mathematical modeling, using a cooperative team approach. We collaborate with the US Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center, which provides access to available real-time products and archived historical data files on marine weather and ocean conditions. This represents a unique resource for research in fisheries oceanography. Opportunities exist in the following areas: (1) specifying linkages of environmental processes to population dynamics of important fish stocks; (2) accounting for natural environmental variance, which currently obscures important signals (e.g., stock-recruitment relationships, multispecies interactions, habitat degradation, and/or pollution) essential for managing human impacts on marine populations; (3) developing methods to effectively forecast effects of environmental variations on availability of fish and on resilience of fish populations to exploitation; (4) assessing the effects of global climate change on oceanographic processes important to fish populations; and (5) using new approaches and technologies to characterize and evaluate marine fisheries habitat. We are particularly interested in the application of remote-sensing technology to these problems as well as the application of archival tags for evaluating habitat use in pelagic organisms.