Christopher Edwards, PhD
Investigator
Christopher Edwards is a professor in the Ocean Sciences Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his BS from Haverford College in 1988 and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1997. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research scientist at the University of Connecticut before becoming a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz in 2002.
Dr Edwards’ research centers on the development and analysis of regional ocean models and methods of data assimilation used for studying ocean circulation, biogeochemistry and fisheries. His research presently focuses on physical and biological interactions within the California Current System, the collection of ocean currents off the U.S. west coast that include both time-mean and temporally variable motions at many scales. His group has studied how ocean circulation creates and organizes biogeographic provinces and habitats that associate with marine organisms and contribute to their connectivity. His group has pioneered application to marine ecosystems of a four-dimensional variational data assimilation method for state estimation that uses a logarithm transform to approximate the non-Gaussian statistics of biogeochemical variables in the ocean. Such methods enable accurate hindcasts of the physical and ecosystem state to understand how the ocean has changed in the past, and offer opportunities for modern ocean observing systems that focus on timely estimates and prediction of ocean properties.