Descriptive Physical Oceanography: an Introduction

Descriptive Physical Oceanography: An Introduction, Seventh Edition is the basic go-to book for learning about what the ocean looks like physically - its motion (circulation, waves, tides, eddies), its physical properties (temperature/salinity distributions and equation of state), its forcing, and its role in the climate system. It includes detailed chapters on each ocean basin and a chapter on the major marginal seas, describing the forcing, circulation, and water masses in each region. A final detailed chapter pulls this all together into the global circulation. In order to understand the physical processes and to understand how data are used, it includes chapters on introductory dynamics and data analysis. Each chapter includes an introductory section that is self-standing, so that particularly for the lectures on specific ocean regions, only the introduction is necessary. The remaining text in those chapters is suitable for and used in targeted seminar courses, or by practitioners who want a quick introduction to circulation and water mass structure of a given region.