Dr. Edwards’s research focuses on the physical oceanography of the continental margins, where shelf-scale processes can have complicated interactions with topography and stratification at the nearshore boundary as well as the shelfbreak. Her current work takes a joint observational/modeling approach to describing the response of the coastal ocean to near-resonant forcing by sea breeze and land breeze near the critical latitude for diurnal/inertial resonance. Heating and cooling of shelf water also induce significant diurnal and supertidal variability in the coastal ocean, but the importance of air-sea interaction and subsynoptic meteorological variability is often neglected for circulation and ecosystem modeling on a regional scale. This higher frequency variability in the ocean and atmosphere (and associated mixing) has important implications for larval transport, nutrient budgets, and the larger coastal ecosystem.
