MS and PhD degrees are offered in Marine and Atmospheric Sciences with specialization in Applied Marine Physics. The overwhelming majority of AMP students are supported as research assistants. These assistantships, which are awarded competitively, provide a monthly stipend and cover tuition costs. Students not supported as research assistants are generally supported on special fellowships provided by their employer or, for some non-US students, their home country.
The RSMAS dock and the R/V Walton Smith
Courtesy Geoff SamuelsAMP graduates have been extremely successful at obtaining challenging well-paid positions in industry, government research laboratories, and academia.
The AMP academic program is built on the core disciplines of fluid mechanics and wave propagation physics. The academic program is quite flexible. Required courses cover fundamental mathematics, fluid mechanics and wave propagation physics. After completing these courses, students specialize in one or more of the following areas: air-sea interaction and surface wave dynamics; underwater acoustics; ocean optics and electromagnetic remote sensing; coastal ocean dynamics.
Students applying for admission should have an undergraduate degree in mathematics, physics, geophysics, or engineering. Applications can be submitted on-line. For more information on the application process, contact the RSMAS graduate studies office.
The formal courses offered by the Division are listed below. Depending on research interests and needs, students can also take courses offered by other Divisions at RSMAS and Departments throughout the University of Miami.
AMP Courses
Coastal Physics and Engineering: Linear wave theory, wave statistics and wave generation. Tides, wind-driven currents and nearshore circulation. Sediment transport by waves and currents, bedforms, bedload and suspended load, longshore and cross-shore transport. Equilibrium beach profiles. Coastal processes models: Pelnard-Considere model for shoreline change and Escoffier model for inlet stability.
Environmental Hydrology: An introduction to the physical processes of hydrological science. The principles of evapotranspiration, precipitation, infiltration, groundwater flow, seepage, overland flow, and stream flow are expounded. Areas of interrelation with environmental, marine, and geophysical sciences are emphasized. Measurement techniques for hydrological variables and statistical analysis of hydrological time series for runs and extremes are also described.
Ocean Measurements: Instrumentation, automatic data acquisition and time series analysis, signals and noise, filtering, and applied statistics.
Introduction to Underwater Acoustics: Sound waves and pulses, harmonic analysis, sound propagation in the ocean, sonar systems, scattering and absorption, acoustic measurement of marine life and sea-floor properties, sound transmission in waveguides, ambient noise, transducers and hydrophones.
Satellite Oceanography: Introduction to remote sensing of the ocean, stressing the physics of radiative processes: Maxwell's equations; blackbody radiation; radiative transfer; modelling; instrumentation; applications of visible, infrared, and microwave observations using objective, multispectral, and characteristic vector analysis.
Applied Ocean Hydrodynamics: The equations governing the dynamics of homogeneous fluids are derived. The concepts of deformation rates, vorticity, stream function, and ideal fluid flow are introduced and demonstrated in applications describing flows in the marine environment. Semi-empirical methods for analyzing viscous flows, boundary layers, and turbulence are presented. Eddy viscosity and more advanced turbulence closure schemes are discussed in the context of coastal circulation, bottom boundary layers and sediment transport.
Wave Propagation in the Ocean Environment: Wave equation models, acoustic and other elastic waves, surface gravity waves, boundary conditions, ray tracing, dispersion, diffraction, reflection, attenuation, and radiation transport methods.
Marine Soil Mechanics: Principles of soil and rock mechanics and dynamics. Theories of poro-elasticity. Sea-seabed interactions. Measurement methods of physical properties of sediments. Introduction to wave propagation through porous media.
Analytical Methods in Marine Physics: Review of linear algebra with emphasis on real symmetric systems. Least squares, optimal estimation, and the Gauss-Markov theorem. Equilibrium in discrete and continuos systems, and the foundations of continuum mechanics. Review of vector and tensor analysis. Calculus of variations and the variational principles of mechanics. Fourier analysis and orthogonal expansions. Integral transforms. The discrete Fourier and z transforms. Functions of a complex variable. Ordinary differential equations. Dynamical systems, the phase plane, stability, and an introduction to chaos. The diffusion equation. Linear and nonlinear wave equations. Applications to marine physics involving wave motion and fluid flow are emphasized throughout the course.
Physics of the Air-Sea Interface: Thermodynamics of the interface; conservation equations; wave generation, propogation and dissipation, boundary layer turbulence; heat, mass and momentum transfer; energy dissipation, intermittency; turbulence closure; wave prediction models.
Marine Vehicle Dynamics: Dynamics of floating bodies. Free surface potential flow and boundary value problems. Dynamics of marine vehicles. Resistance and motions in waves. Slender body hydrodynamics. Strip theory of ship motions. Seakeeping. Maneuvering.
Numerical Modeling in Applied Marine Physics: Techniques and applications of numerical modeling in one of the following topical areas: sound propagation and scattering in the ocean; surface gravity wave propagation and scattering in shallow and intermediate depth water; and hydrodynamics in the coastal ocean environment. Emphasis (sound propagation, gravity wave propagation or hydrodynamics) alternates from year to year.
Coastal Ocean Circulation: Circulation and stratification in the coastal ocean, including the dynamics of wind-driven, tidally-driven, and buoyancy-driven mean and transient flows over variable topography with density stratification. Design of numerical models and observing systems for coastal ocean circulation.
Advanced Underwater Acoustics: Analysis and numerical modeling of sound propagation in the ocean: geometrical acoustics, normal model theory and the parabolic equation method. Recent advances in underwater acoustics: effects of oceanic variability, signal fluctuations, random medium propagation, ocean bottom interactions, and shallow water propagation.
Applied Underwater Acoustics: Sonar systems and operating characteristics, scattering and reverberation, target strength, signal processing, transducers and arrays, detection and noise, acoustic telemetry.
Estuary Dynamics: Water motions in estuaries, lagoons and inlets. Shallow water tides including tide generation, harmonic analysis and analytical solutions to the shallow water wave equations. Classifications of estuaries by topography, circulation and stratification. Mixing concepts including diffusion, dispersion and buoyancy effects. Tide-, wind- and density-driven circulation.
Advanced Wave Hydrodynamics: Wave hindcasting, forecasting, directional wave spectra, probability distributions, transformations in shallow water, nonlinear analysis and wave breaking.
Advanced Geoacoustics: Theory of elastic wave propagation in fluid filled porous media. Energy loss mechanisms in sediments. Methods to measure geoacoustic properties and their spatial variability. Theory of scattering of elastic waves in random poroelastic media.
Transport and Mixing Processes in the Marine Environment: Heat and constituent transport and mixing processes in the marine environment. Derivation of the fundamental equations governing heat and constituent transport and mixing processes. Steady and unsteady heat transfer by conduction, laminar and turbulent convection, and radiation. Steady and unsteady state constituent transfer by diffusion and laminar turbulent convection. Mixing and flushing in tidally-driven coastal waters.
For additional information, see the RSMAS Graduate Studies web page.
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