Dr. James J. O'Brien
Secretary of the Navy Professor - Departments of Meteorology and
Oceanography
Florida State University
R.M. Johnson Building- Suite 200
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2840
COAPS performs research in air-sea interactions including ocean modeling, coupled air-sea modeling, climate prediction on scales of months to decades, statistical studies and predictions of social and economic consequences of ocean-atmospheric variations. The other two main functions are publish papers in scholarly journals and train M.S. and Ph.D. students in these research areas.
COAPS manages numerous grants from Federal agencies, eg. JPL, NASA, NCAR, NOAA, NSF, ONR, from various state agencies and from private industrial firms. COAPS is the location of the FSU Center for The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) Data Archive Center (DAC) -- Special Analysis Center (SAC) for surface meteorology funded by NSF and The Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere (TOGA) COARE Experiment air-sea data archive activity. COAPS is also involved in the planning and analysis of remotely sensed surface winds, e.g., NSCAT. COAPS will continue the research for the Acoustic Thermal Ocean Circulation (ATOC) Experiment under the Global Acoustic Monitoring of Ocean Thermometry (GAMOT) Experiment of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). The center also supports the ONR Undergraduate Minority Program.
The primary computational requirement is the scientific visualization of both our model derived and real ocean and atmosphere data sets. To fulfill this need we have over 20 Silicon Graphics Inc. IRIS graphics workstations, of which most are desktop Indy, Indigo and Indigo2 models with a few Onyx and Origin 2000 machines for high performance, interactive visualization. These are supplemented by several NeXTs and X-window terminals and 50 Macintosh and IBM PCs. To provide the high performance computational needs for our numerical models, we use two SGI Power Challenge machines located here at Florida State and other high performance machines located at supercomputer sites across the country.