Dan Nowacki nowacki.org

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 Jamaica Bay and Great South Bay, NY; Grand Bay, AL/MS; Chincoteague Bay, MD/VA; and the Amazon River, Brazil. Past study sites include the tidal Mekong River, Vietnam; Willapa Bay, WA; the Columbia River, WA; and the Florida Everglades. 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 do the majority of my data analysis within the scientific Python stack. Some of my computing interests lie in data standardization, distribution, and reproducibility. I used to use MATLAB quite a bit; you might find some useful snippets on my codes page. A portion of the code I have written as part of my work at the USGS is available on GitHub.

Contact

• My C.V. is available here (updated December 2018); feel free to email me at dan @ this domain.
• Google Scholar profile

&c.

• States as watershed boundaries
• Cross-country gas mileage
• Check out ship positions of the UNOLS fleet
• Reading list
• I keep track of my airline flights