Brian Arbic is a physical oceanographer. His group focuses on global modeling of internal tides and gravity waves, with growing interests in air-sea interactions and modeling of surface tides and their role in Earth System processes over geological time scales. Other interests include the dynamics and energy budgets of oceanic mesoscale eddies (the oceanic equivalent of atmospheric weather systems), tsunamis, and paleotsunamis. His group uses in-situ and remotely sensed observations, idealized models, and realistic models. He collaborates widely with scientists in the US and abroad, and his projects include collaborations with scientists at large modeling centers, such as the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Europe’s Mercator Modeling Center, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He participates in NASA missions, including the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) mission, and the Ocean Surface Topography mission. Arbic has been a member of the U-M ASC STEM Africa committee since 2012. He is the principal founder of the Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School in Ghana (https://coessing.org), is the lead on the concept note for “An Ocean Corps for Ocean Science” (https://globaloceancorps.org)
The surface expression of the M_2 principal lunar semidiurnal internal tide — the tide that arises due to the stratification of the ocean. The top panel shows analysis of satellite altimetry data, while the bottom shows results from HYCOM, run by collaborators at the Naval Research Laboratory. (Shriver, et al 2012)