Publications

Atmospheric transport of dust from northwest Africa to the western Atlantic Ocean region may be responsible for a number of environmental hazards, including the demise of Caribbean corals; red tides; amphibian diseases; increased occurrence of asthma in humans; and oxygen depletion (eutrophication) in estuaries. Studies of satellite images suggest that hundreds of millions of tons of...

In April and May of 2001, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a geophysical study of the Mississippi River Delta, Atchafalaya River Delta, and Shell Island Pass in southern Louisiana. This study was part of a larger USGS River Contaminant Evaluation (RCE) Project. This disc serves as an archive of unprocessed digital seismic reflection data, trackline navigation files, shotpoint...

No abstract available.

Rivers carry the products of continental weathering, and continuously supply the oceans with a broad range of chemical constituents. This erosional signature is, however, uniquely moderated by biogeochemical processing within estuaries. Estuaries are commonly described as complex filters at land-sea margins, where significant transformations can occur due to strong physico-chemical...

Mid-latitude continental shelves undergo a spring transition as the net surface heat flux changes from cooling to warming. Using in situ data and a numerical circulation model we investigate the circulation and temperature budget on the West Florida Continental Shelf (WFS) for the spring transition of 1999. The model is a regional adaptation of the primitive equation, Princeton Ocean...

The coral reefs in the Caribbean have been deteriorating since the 1970s, and no one is quite sure why. Such environmental devastation is usually blamed on Homo sapiens, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on here. Recently, some scientists at the USGS think they’ve solved the puzzle: Bacteria and fungi have been hitching trans-Atlantic rides on dust from the Sahara desert and...

Benthic foraminiferal species abundance in samples from three Mendeleyev Ridge box cores were analyzed by cluster analysis and the newer method of SHE analysis. Previously, the latter technique only has been used on foraminiferal data from depth transects of modern surface sediment samples. Unlike most methods, which initially compare all possible pairs of samples, the SHE procedure...

The new satellite ocean color sensors offer a means of detecting and monitoring algal blooms in the ocean and coastal zone. Beginning with SeaWiFS (Sea Wide Field-of-view Sensor) in September 1997, these sensors provide coverage every 1 to 2 days with 1-km pixel view at nadir. Atmospheric correction algorithms designed for the coastal zone combined with regional chlorophyll algorithms...

Predictive climate distributions of U.S. landfalling hurricanes are estimated from observational records over the period 1851–2000. The approach is Bayesian, combining the reliable records of hurricane activity during the twentieth century with the less precise accounts of activity during the nineteenth century to produce a best estimate of the posterior distribution on the annual rates...

Trace elements and organic contaminants in bottom-sediment samples collected from 10 sites on the Barron River Canal and from one site on the Turner River in October 1998 had patterns of distribution that indicated different sources. At some sites on the Barron River Canal, lead, copper, and zinc, normalized to aluminum, exceeded limits normally considered as background and may be...

No abstract available

Four-fifths of the population of the United States live in close proximity to the oceans or Great Lakes, and approximately 100 million Americans use the marine environment for recreation each year (Thurman 1994). Consequently, contamination of lakes, rivers, and coastal waters raises significant public health issues. Among the leading sources of chemical and biological contamination of...