PLANNING FOR COASTAL AIR-SEA INTERACTION STUDIES IN COPO

The Coastal Physical Oceanography (CoPO) planning effort has designated three coastal air-sea interaction areas to focus on in a national program to study the physical processes on the continental shelf. These areas are shelf frontogenesis, interaction of stable layers with topography, and forcing by severe storms. The long-term objective of the air-sea interaction component of CoPO is to better understand the structure, dynamics, and evolution of the various mesoscale and synoptic-scale processes that significantly affect coastal/shelf circulation through air-sea interactions. Within this body of knowledge will be an improved quantification of the air-sea exchanges of dynamically important quantities set in the framework of mesoscale and synoptic-scale processes. -from Authors