Last week, Dr. Steve Piacsek from Oceanography Division, Naval Research in Stennis Space center gave us a seminar about the ocean flow and wind.

Oceanic straits generally exert a disproportionately great influence on circulation when one considers their small size and volume. Dr. Piacsek chose three well-known straits for the simulation. They are the Strait of Gibraltar (separating the Atlantic from the Mediterranean), the Strait of Otranto (separating the Adriatic Sea from the rest of the Mediterranean), and the Fram Strait (separating the Arctic Basin from the Greenland Sea).

Dr. Piacsek focus his discussion on the dynamics will focus on the nature of the flow reversals, on the entering and exiting water masses passing at the same depth, or below each other. Specially, Dr. Piacsek showed some straits' multiple reversals. His video tape and many pictures took from the satellite also showed that.

The total computational grids were 378x170x31 for the Mediterranean, and 461x212x23 for the North Atlantic-Arctic domain. The Mediterranean runs were carried out mostly on the SGI Origin 2000, using the pfa version of the SGI parallel compiler, with good scaling up to 16 processors. The Arctic runs were carried out on both the CM5-E and the Origin 2000 at NRL-DC, with data-parallel versions of the code (CM Fortran and HPF).