Physical oceanography

Physical oceanography

The scientific study of the physical conditions and processes related to the motions and physical properties of ocean currents and waters.

Industry: Earth science

Add a new term

Contributors in Physical oceanography

Become a Contributors

Physical oceanography

transitive

Earth science; Physical oceanography

In dynamical systems theory, a system is said to be transitive if different sets of initial conditions all evolve to a single resultant state. Compare to intransitive and almost intransitive.

Soret effect

Earth science; Physical oceanography

In fluid mechanics, mass diffusion caused by a temperature gradient.

In geophysical data processing this is most simply defined as any unwanted signal, and given that one person’s signal can be another person’s noise, this is ultimately a relative term. For example, ...

principal oscillation patterns (POP)

Earth science; Physical oceanography

In linear cases, PIPs reduce to damped normal modes or POPs, that represent the eigenoscillations of the reduced linear dynamical system.

transfer efficiency

Earth science; Physical oceanography

In marine ecology, the ratio of the production of one trophic level to that of the next. This is a reasonable estimate of the ecological efficiency if it is assumed that the energy extracted from a ...