is an oceanographer, mathematical ecologist, and artist in Glasgow.
I made this video for a town hall event called “From the tide pool to the stars” at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting. It documents the generation of Droplet (2012) from an initial field of seeds. My hope is that it would make one think of things that are very large and things that are … Read more
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 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
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 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
Gallery on flickr. This series consists of sketches in a couple of different families leading up to Droplet (2012). Many of these works were originally shown at the Blindfold Gallery in Seattle in 2012. I wrote a bit about them at the time, and explained a bit more in an interview with SeattleArtBloc. More recently, … Read more
Banas NS, MacDonald PS, Armstrong DA (2009) Green crab larval retention in Willapa Bay, Washington: An intensive Lagrangian modeling approach.
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
Two of my pieces were published in beautiful two-page spreads in Patterns 2: Design, Art, and Architecture (Birkhaüser, 2008). They’re from these series.
