This textbook was written for Ocean 285: Physics Across Oceanography, offered at the University of Washington.

This class reflects material and approaches that were developed over 25 years of teaching undergraduates in the School of Oceanography at UW. While fluid mechanics is traditionally an advanced subject, Oceanography and Marine Biology majors can benefit from a more basic treatment, ideally early in their degree, as foundational material for understanding interdisciplinary topics. That is the motivation for this book.

I inherited entire courses from, and collaboratively developed aspects of teaching undergraduate ocean physics with, several UW faculty members including Larry Coachman, Knut Aagaard, LuAnne Thompson, Mitsuhiro Kawase and Kathy Kelly. Ideas that are partially theirs are no doubt in my mind as I write this text. Jacob Wenegrat co-developed Ocean 285 with me about five years ago, and together we worked out new approaches to the material. I am grateful to past classes, and especially their TAs, for helping to refine a number of aspects. And finally, many thanks to the Fall 2020 “pandemic Zoom” teaching team: Georgy Manucharyan, Zhihua Zheng and Keely Hall, along with the whole class for beta testing a draft. Among these students was an undergraduate research assistant, Jerry Liu, who read with particularly sharp eyes. His attention to detail resulted in the correction of many typos. Errors that undoubtedly remain are my fault entirely – please let me know as you find them!

Susan Hautala, 2020
hautala@uw.edu