JAMES C. McWILLIAMS
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and IGPP
UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1565
310-206-2829
jcm@atmos.ucla.edu
Current Research Subjects:
*Vortex dynamics, ranging from Taylor-microscale filaments to hurricanes.
*The behavior of coherent structures in turbulence, including their
controls on system evolution.
*Mesoscale eddies and the maintenance of the oceanic general
circulation.
*Coastal oceanic circulations associated with upwelling, river plumes,
tides, eddies, island and headland wakes, shallow continental
shelves and slopes, ridges, and shorelines.
*Submesoscale fronts and secondary instabilities of mesoscale currents,
as well as the routes to dissipation they provide for the oceanic
general circulation. (This is the presently dark continent in an
intermediate-scale dynamical regime with marginal controls by
planetary rotation and stable stratification.)
*Dynamical coupling between surface gravity waves, boundary layer
turbulence, surf-zone wave breaking, and systematic currents,
partially derived within a multi-scale asymptotic theoretical
framework and then carried into realistic simulation models.
*Evolution of tidally generated internal solitary waves and bores
through the successive stages of creation, propagation, steepening,
breaking, mixing, and dissipation.
*Upscale influences from key regions onto planetary-scale climate (e.g., the
effects of Andean winds and Peruvian currents on global precipitation).
*Intrinsic climate variability and the likelihood of inherent limits to
simulation precision (e.g., a global warming forecast) due to generic
structural instability of chaotic dynamical systems.
*Regional Earth-system science --- emerging from the combined effects
of waves, tides, currents, winds, clouds, watersheds, sediments,
pollutants, biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystems --- and evolving on
the landscape scale under changing global conditions.
*Computational techniques for realistic atmospheric and oceanic
simulations.
*Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence and dynamo action in proto-stellar
disks, galaxies, inter-stellar plasmas, and molecular clouds.
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