Events June 2019 OES Beacon

“FROM LITTLE THINGS, BIG THINGS GROW” (Paul Kelly, 1992) IEEE/OES 12th CWTMA Workshop, San Diego 10–13 March 2019

From Mal Heron, Sandy Williams and Hugh Roarty

The group photo.
Student paper sessions (left to right): Rick Cole (General Chair),
Trevor Harrison, Lisa Nyman, Michael Stresser, David Ortiz-Suslow, Grant ickelsen, Mairi Dorward, Kelsey Brunner, Colin Evans and Hugh Roarty (CWTMA Technology Committee Chair).

A brilliant success! Under the auspices of the CWTMA Technology Committee, the twelfth Currents, Waves, Turbulence Measurements and Applications Workshop started with a flourish by Prof. Jen MacKinnon from Scripps who delivered the keynote address entitled “Tools for a Multi-Scale World”. The theme of her talk was that we must not underestimate the impact of small-scale processes in oceanography: hence the title for this article. She called for multiple tools for overlapping scales in time and space; and she emphasized the need for measuring different parameters at the same time and in the same space. Sometimes better insights can be gained from coherent structures than from conventional statistics of an ensemble. This served as an excellent entry into the theme “CWTMA in the 2020s” and many papers aimed at higher resolution and improved accuracy for those key measurements.

The single-stream workshop had 46 presentations and 87 delegates. The venue had two adjacent, connected rooms; one for the presentations and one for breakout and a trade exhibition with 10 vendor booths. On a straw poll, some 30% of delegates claimed that this was their first CWTMA in the 36-year history. The presentations included new directions in microwave radars, applications with sensors on drones and fine-scale measurements.


Best paper award went to Jochen Horstmann (left)
and Michael Stresser, presented by Rick Cole (right).

Student papers were presented on the first morning and five awards of $1,000 were made as follows (alphabetically):

Mairi Dorward “Currents, Waves and Turbulence Measurement: A View from Multiple Industrial-Academic Projects in Tidal Stream Energy”.

Colin Evans “Towards Implementing the Operational Use of High Frequency Radar Wave Parameter Estimations in Puerto Rico”.

Lisa Nyman “A New Empirical Approach to Detect Surface Currents Using Doppler Marine Radar”.
David Ortiz-Suslow “Quantifying the Impact of Nonlinear Internal Waves on the Atmospheric Surface Layer”.

Michael Stresser “Remote Quantification of Nearshore Wave Energy Dissipation Rates from Coherent X-Band Radar Backscatter”.

The best paper award for the conference went to Michael Stresser and Jochen Horstmann from Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht for their paper titled “Remote Quantification of Nearshore Wave Energy Dissipation Rates from Coherent X-Band Radar Backscatter”.

The exhibitors were well integrated and added a good practical dimension to the conference.
(alphabetically):
Deep Water Buoyancy
Del Mar
GTS Consulting, Inc.
Metocean Telemetrics
Ocean Innovations
Pacific Gyre
Rockland Scientific
Sonardyne
Teledyne
Xylem—Anderaa/YSI-ISS

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