Hi! I’m an oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey based in Santa Cruz, California and previously in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I received my Ph.D. from the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle. My M.S.E. is in Civil & Environmental Engineering, also from the UW. Previously, I was a hydrologist at the USGS’s National Research Program in Reston, VA. I was born and raised in the state of Maine.
Research
Generally, I am interested in the sediment transport and morphology of coastal and riverine systems. I’m currently involved with studies in Puget Sound, WA; San Francisco Bay, CA; and sites on the Alaskan North Slope. Past study sites include the tidal Amazon River, Brazil; the tidal Mekong River, Vietnam; Chincoteague Bay, MD/VA; Grand Bay, AL/MS; Jamaica Bay and Great South Bay, NY; Willapa Bay, WA; the Columbia River, WA; and the Florida Everglades, among others. I’ve also been part of studies on the New Zealand continental shelf and other interesting places around the world.
In addition to these active field programs, I use numerical models to answer questions about sediment transport, wave interaction with vegetation, coastal vulnerability and resilience, and more. These models include SWASH, SWAN, ROMS, Delft3D, and junky little hand-coded numbers.
Coding
I perform data analysis primarily within the scientific Python stack. Some of my computing interests lie in data standardization, distribution, and reproducibility. A portion of the code I have written as part of my work at the USGS is available on GitHub; I have contributed code to a couple of open-source projects including xarray.
I previously used MATLAB quite a bit, and you might find some useful snippets on my MATLAB codes page.
Features &c.
- Santa Cruz Shows an experiment in aggregating music events in Santa Cruz
- DJN Notes short notes for posterity
- Albums Not sure what to listen to? Into giving credence to corporate media critics? This page suggests one album per day for you to enjoy: a random selection from the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
- States as watershed boundaries dynamic visualzations of watershed boundaries that intersect state borders
- Cross-country gas mileage gas mileage and cost, visualized
- Ship positions of the UNOLS fleet daily updated locations of scientific research vessels
- Airline flights where I’ve flown, since 2004 or thereabouts
- Almost a decade ago I wrote some now-outdated instructions on getting Delft3D running on Linux.
Posts
- Writing scientific papers using LaTeX updated 2022-12-13
- Atom + Hydrogen Instructions on how to keep this editor and plugin combination working after Atom’s sunset date 2022-12-08
- Scientific figure design in Python 2020-05-02
Contact
- My C.V. is available here (updated 2023-09-19); feel free to email me at dan @ this domain.
- Google Scholar profile
