Coasts – Neil Banas

“to see sandeel the way kittiwakes do”

Kittiwakes and many other UK seabirds have declined rapidly over several decades, alongside declines in the energy available in the ocean food chain that supports them. Agnes Olin’s PhD project (2018-2020) focused on sandeels as a link in this chain, looking upward to their spatial association with trends in kittiwake numbers, and downward to changes … Read more

Early warning for Pseudo-nitzschia HABs on Pacific Northwest beaches: From plankton ecology to operational decision support

Certain species of the phytoplankton Pseudo-nitzschia (PN) produce a potent neurotoxin, domoic acid (DA), that bioaccumulates in shellfish, and can cause severe illness and death in humans. Past outbreaks have caused fisheries closures and millions of dollars of losses to crab and clam harvesters, and contributed to the death of many species of marine mammals. … Read more

Future oceanography of Puget Sound: a first look

Climate change pushes on coastal and estuarine regions by a lot of pathways simultaneously, and it is surprisingly hard to untangle and prioritise these. As just one example from the US Pacific Northwest: should we expect future water temperatures to go up or down? Up makes sense, because of atmospheric warming. Down also makes sense, … Read more

Why is the Northwest coast so productive?

The Pacific Northwest coast is the most biologically productive region of the California Current upwelling system, despite the fact that the upwelling winds are much stronger farther south. How can this be?

Modeling Cascadia

The Cascadia model from the Univ of Washington Coastal Modeling Group is a realistic 3D model, implemented in ROMS, of the North American Pacific Northwest coast from mid-Oregon to mid-Vancouver Island, including the inland waters of the Salish Sea. It was developed as part of the NSF/NOAA PNWTOX (Pacific Northwest Toxins) project, based on previous … Read more

Connectivity among rivers and subbasins of Puget Sound

Compared with most large, temperate estuaries, the biogeochemistry of Puget Sound is highly marine dominated: 70% of dissolved nutrients come from the Pacific. Nevertheless, there’s significant policy and management interest in understanding watershed contributions of environmental stressors, e.g. nutrient loading in relation to hypoxia, and pathogen and pollutant impacts on commercial, recreational, and tribal shellfish … Read more

flowWeaver: Visualizing the circulation of the Pacific Northwest coast

flowWeaver is an interactive tool for exploring transport and connectivity patterns in high-resolution ocean models such as ROMS. The initial application (version 0.4.3) contains two weeks of Salish Sea and Pacific Northwest coastal circulation during summer 2005. The underlying ocean model is MoSSea (Modeling the Salish Sea). Pablo Otero has adapted flowWeaver for an operational … Read more

Invasive green crab in Willapa Bay (2009)

Banas NS, MacDonald PS, Armstrong DA (2009) Green crab larval retention in Willapa Bay, Washington: An intensive Lagrangian modeling approach.

Biophysical modeling of the Columbia River plume (2009)

The model As part of the NSF RISE (River Influences on Shelf Ecosystems) program, my collaborators and I coupled a four-box ecosystem model to a high-resolution hindcast of the Washington-Oregon coast, to examine Columbia River plume effects on coastal biological production. For more information, see Banas NS, Lessard E, Kudela R, MacCready P, Peterson T, … Read more

Hypoxia in Lynch Cove, WA, USA (2009)

“Controls on primary production in a new, mid-complexity, biophysical model of Hood Canal” (poster, CERF conference, 2009). Here is the interactive version of the model.

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