Russ E. Davis
University of California, San Diego
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Primary Section: 16, Geophysics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1988)
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Biosketch
Davis’ contributions to oceanography span instrument development, field observation and theory. Developments include a current meter, surface and deep drifters, acoustic Doppler current profilers, profiling floats for mid-level Argo, a 6km-depth profiling float to expand Argo’s sampling, an effective multi-purpose underwater glider, Spray, a zooplankton camera for glider use, and gliders instrumented to explore the upper ocean food web. He has observed the ocean circulation, including a time series of western boundary transports, studied mixed layer dynamics, diffusion of particles, the coastal-upwelling overturning cell, and the relation of Solomon Sea transport to the ENSO cycle. He carried out early studies of array design (of MODE) and large-scale mapping using statistically optimized "objective mapping." He adapted that approach to the predicting climate variability from sea surface temperature. Davis' experiments are parsimonious and his analysis is elegant.
Research Interests
My research interests are physical oceanography, air-sea interaction, Lagrangian description of flows, and ocean climate dynamics.
