James C. McWilliams

University of California, Los Angeles


Primary Section: 16, Geophysics
Membership Type:
Member (elected 2002)

Research Interests

As a geophysical fluid dynamicist I explore how material advection in a fluid produces the peculiar combination of global order and local chaos -and vice versa - evident in oceanic currents, as well as analogous phenomena in atmospheric and astrophysical flows. Some of my particular interests are coherent vortices in turbulence, interactions among surface waves and nearby winds and currents, general circulation of the ocean, Earth's climate and its intrinsic variability, coastal physical-biogeochemical dynamics, and computational simulations of nature.

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