Air-Ice-Ocean Interaction: Turbulent Ocean Boundary Layer Exchange Processes , Miles McPhee
Springer, New York, 2008. $119.00 (215pp.). ISBN 978-0-387-78334-5
The immensely complex interactions between the atmosphere, sea ice, and ocean limit the ability of scientists to understand recent change to polar climates. Exchanges of momentum, heat, and salt between the ocean and overlying sea ice are critical to the evolution of the sea ice; as a consequence, they influence the regional and global climate systems. Miles McPhee’s descriptively titled monograph, Air-Ice-Ocean Interaction: Turbulent Ocean Boundary Layer Exchange Processes, is a timely contribution, given the recent attention being paid to the climate of the polar regions. As the author succinctly states: “Rapid and apparently accelerating changes in the state of the Arctic ice pack lend a sense of urgency: essentially, it seems that Nature is solving the equations a lot faster than we are.”
McPhee is an acknowledged expert on the important ocean boundary layer beneath sea ice. His book, which ties together almost four decades of research, details the current understanding of how the shallowest water layers and wind-forced sea ice interact and how that interaction can be modeled numerically. The range of topics covered in the first six chapters includes the use of ice–based measurements for estimating turbulent fluxes in the ice–ocean boundary layer and the influence of wind stress on the structure of that layer. In the remaining three chapters, McPhee introduces approaches for numerically modeling the ice–ocean boundary layer. He demonstrates, through comparison of model output and field data, how numerical models can serve as a tool to interpret measurements and explore the boundary layer’s evolution.
McPhee’s monograph, a window onto his career as a polar oceanographer, is interspersed with personal stories about his field experiences. Those accounts add color, depth, and historical perspective to the analyses. For example, in explaining the unstable conditions in the upper ocean caused by rapidly freezing ice, he engages the reader with a personal account of waiting with colleagues at an ice camp for the ice to fracture and expose a lead, or channel of open water. The research team, poised to transport equipment and shelters to the lead in helicopters, would have limited time to deploy instruments and take measurements in the critical period when the lead remained open. The anecdote gives the reader a glimpse into the effort behind every laborious measurement. In that and other examples, McPhee accentuates how sea ice is an ideal platform from which to measure boundary-layer processes. Indeed, sea-ice-based measurements form the basis for most of the field programs carried out by the author and his colleagues.
Air-Ice-Ocean Interaction will be a valuable reference for Arctic and Antarctic researchers—be they observers, numerical modelers, or theoreticians. It will also be an excellent resource for Earth sciences graduate students. In fact, McPhee developed the book partly from lecture notes he used to teach an air-sea-ice interaction course in Svalbard, Norway. His monograph would make a fine graduate-level companion text with The Geophysics of Sea Ice (Plenum Press, 1986) edited by Norbert Untersteiner. That now out-of-print, hefty book, which includes a chapter entitled “The Upper Ocean” by McPhee, presents a broad overview of sea ice and polar oceanography. The more topic-specific Air-Ice-Ocean Interaction gives an up-to-date exposition of present knowledge of the ice-ocean interaction.
As a researcher in the field, I could open McPhee’s practical text and refer to a specific chapter without needing to read the book from cover to cover. In that regard, the nomenclature definitions at the end of each chapter and the chapter abstracts are particularly helpful. However, one is occasionally left hunting through a chapter for variable or acronym definitions that were introduced several chapters earlier. The nomenclature definitions could be more inclusive, and a table of acronyms would be an effective appendix. Further, more meticulous editing would have improved the text. Despite those minor shortcomings, Air-Ice-Ocean Interaction will provide students and researchers alike with the theoretical principles needed for rigorous investigations of ongoing and future polar climate processes and change.
