The sixth edition of Descriptive Physical Oceanography provides an introduction to descriptive physical oceanography for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. The emphasis is on large-scale oceanography, based mainly in observations, with some topics from waves and coastal oceanography also included. Topics include the physical properties of seawater, heat and salt budgets, instrumentation, data analysis methods, introductory dynamics, oceanography and climate variability of each of the oceans and of the global ocean, and brief introductions to the physical setting, waves, and coastal oceanography.
Descriptive Physical Oceanography includes: expanded ocean basin descriptions, including ocean climate variability, emphasizing dynamical context; new chapters on global ocean circulation and introductory ocean dynamics; and, companion website containing PowerPoint figures, supplemental chapters, and practical exercises for analyzing a global ocean data set using Java OceanAtlas.
Chapter 1: Introduction and brief history of physical oceanography
Chapter 2: Ocean dimensions, shapes and bottom materials
Chapter 3: Physical properties of seawater
Chapter 4: Typical Distributions of Water Characteristics
Chapter 5: Mass, Salt and Heat Budgets of the Oceans
Chapter 6: Instruments and Methods
Chapter 7: Data analysis concepts
Chapter 8: Dynamical processes for descriptive ocean circulation
Chapter 9: Atlantic Ocean
Chapter 10: Pacific Ocean
Chapter 11: Indian Ocean
Chapter 12: The Arctic Ocean and Nordic Seas
Chapter 13: Southern Ocean
Chapter 14: Global circulation and water properties
Chapter 15: Coastal oceanography and gravity waves
Lynne Talley is a Professor of Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of California San Diego. Lynne is a seagoing oceanographer with research interests in the water mass distributions and circulation of the world ocean. She is a graduate of Oberlin College (B.A. in physics) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program (Ph.D. in physical oceanography). She has been an editor of the Journal of Physical Oceanography and has served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR4 and AR5), many committees of the National Academy of Sciences, and planning and steering committees for major field programs, including the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) of the 1990s and the U.S. Global Ocean Carbon and Repeat Hydrography Program. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the Oceanography Society, and the American Meteorological Society.
"This book and ancillary web-based appendices are a valuable reference for the modern-day seabird ecologist, providing a wealth of baseline information and serving as a language guide for describing physical oceanography [...] I highly recommend this updated classic text on descriptive physical oceanography."
– Marine Ornithology, Volume 40, No. 1, 2012