UC Marine Council

The coastline of Southern California that stretches from Point Conception into Baja California, known as the Southern California Bight, is populated by approximately 24 million Californians. As a result of human activities in the region, large quantities of pollutants are discharged into the marine environment of Southern California from urban and agricultural sources. The Santa Barbara Channel, at the northern extent of the bight is a region of significant ecological, recreational, aesthetic, mineral, and fisheries resources. The Channel is a unique location on the west coast, supporting a large abundance and diversity of marine species due to the confluence of sub-polar and sub-tropical water masses in the area. Due to the typical pole-ward circulation pattern in the bight, pollutants generated along the Southern California coast are carried through the Channel and result in largely unquantified impacts to the region's valuable resources. This proposed research would examine the evolution of coastal circulation in the central and eastern Santa Barbara Channel to augment ongoing characterization efforts in the west Channel with the ultimate goal of understanding the dispersion and transport of pollutants as well as planktonic larvae throughout the Santa Barbara Channel. The proposed research will compliment other research programs in the region including the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program which focuses on the ecological effects of terrestrial runoff on coastal kelp reef habitats and the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Coastal Ocean (PISCO) which is concerned with long term monitoring of larval distributions and recruitment patterns. Funding for this proposal would support the graduate student researcher's efforts to characterize regional forcing mechanisms and circulatory responses using a high frequency (HF) radar system (CODAR - Coastal Ocean Dynamic Applications Radar) for observation of evolving surface current patterns combined with moored meteorological and current observations. The goal will be to provide a description of the significant advective and dispersive transport pathways with a spatial resolution and continuity that is not possible at coastal scales using other means.