I am a physical oceanographer who uses observations to study how ocean water is mixed and transformed. I am currently working as Research Scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Previously, I worked as a physical oceanographer with RBR in Ottawa, Ontario, and as a postdoctoral investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole Massachusetts. I obtained my PhD in physical oceanography in 2012 from Dalhousie University, working with Dr. Dan Kelley.

In the ocean, seawater is constantly being transformed by physical processes. From turbulence caused by internal waves in an estuary, to large-scale interaction with the atmosphere at high latitudes, to freshwater input at the very edge of the Greenland ice sheet, changes in temperature and salinity control the density of seawater, which in turn determines ocean currents. The scales involved range from 10’s of kilometers (eddies spun off from an unstable boundary current) to millimeters (the scale at which kinetic energy is dissipated by turbulence). My interests lie in obtaining measurements to reveal the details of these dynamic processes, with an emphasis on new and emerging autonomous technologies, such as floats, gliders, and remote observatories.

I am an advocate of free, open-source, and reproducible software tools for science, and as such am a long-time user of R and the R package ecosystem for my work. I am an active developer and co-author of the oce package for doing oceanographic analysis, as well as the argoFloats package for finding, downloading, and working with data from the global Argo array of profiling floats.

• clarkrichards.org
• email: clark.richards AT dfo-mpo.gc.ca / clark.richards AT gmail.com
• twitter: @clarkgrichards