pacific – Neil Banas

Deep-water intrusions

An essay moving between philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, Haida mythteller Skaay, and the North Pacific Ocean. In Flemish (transl. Samuel Vriezen) in nY issue 32, Jan 2017, a special issue on Isabelle Stengers; or read my English original here. “What strikes me, as a modern student of the non-human members of Skaay’s marine landscape, … 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

The Bering Sea in spring, 1971-2050

The Eastern Bering Sea hosts extremely rich pelagic and benthic fisheries, and also experiences strong interannual variation in both fisheries recruitment and the underlying physics and plankton biology. This paper…

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

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.

Dynamics of Willapa Bay, WA, USA (2005)

Dynamics of Willapa Bay, Washington, USA: Links to the coastal ocean, tidal dispersion, and oyster carrying capacity (PhD, Univ of Washington, 2005).