Varied observations over Oregon’s continental shelf illustrate the
beauty and complexity of geophysical flows in coastal waters. Rapid, creative, and
sometimes fortuitous sampling from ships and moorings has allowed detailed looks
at boundary layer processes, internal waves (some extremely nonlinear), and coastal
currents, including how they interact. These processes drive turbulence and mixing
in shallow coastal waters and encourage rapid biological responses, yet are poorly
understood and parameterized. The work presented here represents examples of
efforts by many physical oceanographers to quantify small-scale, coastal-mixing
processes so that their effects might be included in regional circulation models
