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Student Defenses
MS Plan A Defense: Relationships between tsunami size and earthquake magnitude improved by fault parameters
Lin SUN. Megathrust earthquakes are the main source of tsunamis. The rupture at the plate interface deforms the seafloor, displacing seawater over a large region. The earthquake magnitude is not the only factor that affects the tsunami amplitude. A tsunami earthquake, which produces a much larger tsunami than what can be inferred from the seismic energy release, exemplifies this phenomenon. This thesis examines relationships between tsunami size and key geophysical attributes such as fault depth, fault dip, fault size, rigidity, and water depth besides moment magnitude. The parametric study involves four sets of simplified megathrust-ocean models and utilizes an elastic
MS Plan A Defense: A fatigue analysis of the No-WEC mooring system at the U.S. Navy Wave Energy Test Site off Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi
Cameron Morrow Graduate Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawai'i In order to reduce carbon emissions, there is a pressing need to look for alternative fuel sources. Energy created by renewable sources is the way of the future. One of the emerging renewable energy technologies is wave energy. The theoretical gross power generated from waves is 3.7 TW, but the estimated total net power is 3 TW. The Wave Energy Test Site (WETS), off the coast of Marine Corps Base Hawaiʻi, provides a unique location for the full-scale validation of Wave Energy Conversion (WEC) devices in the
MS Plan B Defense: Extreme wave height estimation from a global wave hindcast ensemble
Zoom Meeting ID______ 947 5656 0724 Passcode: OREAndi Erickson Graduate Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Across the oceans, strong storms generate powerful waves that impact human activities such as commerce and design of coastal and offshore structures. To mitigate damages to these activities and to properly design infrastructures, it is imperative to understand the extreme wave climate. Previous works typically use a single dataset to describe the extreme wave climate. Here we analyze a comprehensive ensemble of 11 wave hindcasts most covering 30 years (1979-2016) to estimate extreme wave conditions at a commonly used return period of 100 years. To
MS Plan B Defense: Modeling of hurricane waves for design of coastal infrastructure
Zoom Meeting ID______ 853 4276 3602 Passcode: U7H0uXGiannicola Tumino Di Costanzo Graduate Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa The subtropical Hawaiian Islands are subject to occasional hurricanes that bring the risk of infrastructure damage and financial loss. Determination of hurricane wave conditions in terms of return period is important for coastal infrastructure design and risk management. This study assembles and validates a hurricane wave model and utilizes the model to determine probabilistic design wave conditions for a study site at west Maui. The Delft3D software, which includes a parametric hurricane model and SWAN (Simulating Waves Nearshore), is used to determine significant
MS Plan A Defense: Morphodynamic changes due to calm-moderate wave forcing: A case study of Waikiki Beach
Zoom Meeting ID______ 999 8388 9554 Passcode: OREJulianne Kalksma Graduate Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Sea level rise, erosion, and the wave climate influence Waikiki Beach on the South Shore of Oahu which is a popular beach in metropolitan Honolulu. In response to recent erosion events and ongoing beach nourishments, weekly surveys have been collected for the past 3 years, from April 2018 through December 2020, to better understand coastal morphology. Local studies found detailed two-dimensional morphological structures; however, no direct relationships between the offshore driving ocean conditions and Waikiki Beach have been established. Other previous works relate the wave
MS Plan B Defense: Simulation and validation of the effects of thermally buoyant flow on Subsea Laser Transmission
Zoom Meeting ID: 961 6222 2366 Passcode: OREseminarStefan Mrozewski Graduate Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawaii at Manoa Point-to-point underwater laser communication systems are being developed to address increasing subsea data needs and bandwidth requirements. Many use cases - such as transmitting data from distributed sensors installed on subsea oilfield infrastructure - feature laser beams passing above heat sources such as flowlines. These thermal sources induce natural convection in the surrounding seawater, changing its refractive index. Maintaining point-to-point laser telemetry thus requires characterizing and mitigating the effects of these thermally buoyant flows on beam propagation. Hydrodynamics code is used to simulate heat and
MS Plan A Defense: Detecting spinner dolphin (Stenella longirostris) clicks in noisy and low sampling rate hydrophone recordings
https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/97451743079Kei Manabe Master's Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Zoom Meeting Link: Meeting ID: 974 5174 3079 Passcode: OREdefense https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/97451743079 Development of automated detection algorithms for cetacean vocalizations is important to facilitate marine mammal research. This thesis focuses on click train detection in cases in which sampling rates are too low to capture the full bandwidth of the clicks, and in which impulsive noise confounds current detection methods. We develop an algorithm to detect/classify odontocete click trains based on the regular timing of clicks; the method relies on the slowly- varying nature of Inter-Click
MS Plan A Defense: Seasonal wave climate anomalies on the North Shore indicative of erosion conditions
https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/98606638344Andrew Storey Master’s Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Zoom Meeting Link Meeting ID: 986 0663 8344 Passcode: ORE https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/98606638344 Sea level rise and seasonal wave climate have beset the Sunset Beach shoreline community with several episodic erosion events that have impacted local infrastructure. In support of the local community, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Honolulu District has employed a series of remote sensing technologies at Sunset Beach to generate a regional sediment budget to better inform the community of their situation. The objective of this study is to explain the more
MS Plan B Defense: Direction of arrival estimation of acoustic signals from a 2-element hydrophone array
https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/83894998063Jacob Foster Master’s Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Zoom Meeting Link Meeting ID: 838 9499 8063 passcode: ORE https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/83894998063 This project explores the performance of the Maximum Eigengap Estimator in the omnidirectional hydrophone setting. The estimator is an unsupervised signal subspace steering vector estimator that we use to conduct direction-of-arrival estimation of ocean acoustic signals. It uses narrow-band aggregation of a broadband signal with an optimal weighting to maximize the signal-to-noise ration and identify the eigenvector that is closely oriented to the source signal that is computed from the sensor array output. The
MS Plan B Defense: A wave-flume study of the dispersion of tsunami-induced debris: Freight containers on a moored container ship
Holmes Hall 247 2540 Dole St, Honolulu, HI, United StatesJohn Melve Master’s Student Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Holmes Hall 247 Having a substantial understanding of the hazards from tsunamis is very crucial to minimize the casualties and losses in coastal communities. The impacts of tsunamis on the pacific island nations can cause a huge devastating impact on road infrastructure, ports and harbor facilities, airports, and hotels close to the ocean. This will reciprocate to the tourism industry as a source of economic revenue for the islands. This experimental study specifically focused on the dispersion of the freight containers that are on a
MS Plan B Defense: Estimating marine atmospheric boundary layer stratification with synthetic aperture radar data
Jonathan B. Chapman, PE Department of Ocean & Resources Engineering University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Location Information **This defense will be held both in person (Kuykendall Hall 101) and over Zoom** Meeting ID: 914 1679 5922 Passcode: 808795 https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/91416795922 Uncertainties in the lower atmosphere’s stratification, which is the balance between buoyancy and shear, lead to large uncertainties when determining air-sea fluxes. Previous works show that synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sea surface roughness images show atmospheric phenomena that are known to be related to stratification. In this project, we hypothesize that physics-guided neural networks (PGNNs) can be used to estimate
PhD Defense. Of RATs and Men: Underwater passive acoustic localization investigations using relative arrival times and blind channel estimation
HIG 110 2525 Correa Road, Honolulu, HI, United StatesBrendan P. Rideout PhD Candidate Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Location Information **This defense is hybrid** In person in HIG 110 Zoom meeting ID: 935 1677 2350, Passcode: ORE https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/93516772350 Please join us afterwards (~12:30 pm) in the HIG courtyard to congratulate Brendan Understanding the ecology of any organism requires an understanding of all its life stages. Underwater acoustics provides the ability to observe the submerged lives of marine mammals in ways not possible through visual means. The complexities of underwater acoustic propagation yield both challenges and opportunities to extract information from recorded data,