Physical, Littoral and Coastal Oceanography team (OPLC)

Energy exchange in the ocean takes place through a large number of physical processes associated with different spatio-temporal scales and dimensions. Our subjects of study encompass the climatic scale, the meso- to (sub)mesoscale and even microstructure turbulence. These dynamic structures are found at the surface as well as at depth and at interfaces (air/sea, coast/offshore) and are coupled together by energy cascades.

The objectives of the laboratory's physics team are to study multi-scale processes and their interactions in ocean dynamics and with the atmosphere.

Our team has a very wide range of instruments and models, each of which provides a fragmented view of this ocean of energy: in situ measurements, radar remote sensing measurements, coastal sensor networks, numerical circulation models. It has also recently adopted new tools such as spatial data analysis and artificial intelligence methods, the latter providing new paradigms for data analysis.

Our main objective is to merge these data in order to fill in the missing scales, link them together and thus gain a more complete four-dimensional view of the processes involved. This more global approach will enable us to address issues that are important both from a scientific point of view and because of their implications for current societal and climate issues (heat and matter transport dynamics, natural hazards, extreme events, etc.).

These research objectives can be broken down into several areas of study:

• Coastal oceanography
• Waves, currents and coastal processes
• Flow at the air/sea interface
• Ocean vertical velocities and biogeochemical coupling

The OPLC team is based mainly at the Marseille-Luminy and Toulon-La Garde campuses. It has testing and instrumentation facilities at both sites, as well as sensor networks in the region:

1. The large wind tunnel at OSU Pytheas (Marseille-Luminy),
2. Hydrodynamic basins shared with the SEATECH engineering school (Toulon-La Garde),
3. HTMNET sensor network,
4. HF radar network in the Toulon region
5. Instrumental development for offshore campaigns Instrumented moorings: instrumented moorings, instruments for measuring vertical ocean speed (Free-Fall ADCP, Vertical Velocity Profiler).