Local oceanographer wins top award

SANDPOINT — An area resident has been chosen a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow for the second time by the Department of Defense.

“The program awards grants to top-tier researchers from U.S. universities to conduct long-term, unclassified, basic research of strategic importance to the Defense Department,” according to news release.

“These grants engage outstanding scientists and engineers in the most challenging technical issues facing the department."

Sandpoint resident Steve Elgar is one of 32 fellows, each of whom will conduct research in a specific scientific discipline, including neuroscience, quantum information science, nanoscience, applied mathematics, and in Elgar’s case, earth science. One fellow is a Nobel Prize laureate.

Elgar was also an award recipient in 2009. 

Elgar is a senior researcher for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which is based in Woods Hole, Mass. He received the largest single-investigator award this year, amounting to $3 million for his lab, he said.

“The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is dedicated to research and education to advance understanding of the ocean and its interaction with the Earth system, and to communicating this understanding for the benefit of society,” according to the organization’s mission statement.

Elgar grew up in Riggins, Idaho. He earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and mathematics from the University of Idaho in 1980. He went on to earn a doctorate in oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography five years later. Soon thereafter, Elgar taught at Washington State University and, later, at the University of Idaho. He and his wife, Britt, raised their family in Moscow, Idaho. They moved to Sandpoint 20 years ago, he said.

"My wife and lab partner, Britt, and I are field-oriented scientists (oceanographers), and we spend quite a bit of time at field sites during 'good weather,' which usually means summer and fall. We work in the water (surfzone, river mouths, inlets, tidal flats). So, we travel often. Over the last few years we have done fieldwork on Martha’s Vineyard, near Cape Cod, Mass., at an Army research facility on the Outer Banks of N. C., on the Skagit Tidal Flats near La Connor, Wash., and the mouth of the Skagit River, at Marine Base Camp Lejuene in N. C., and San Diego, Calif.," Elgar said.

He listed “observations and models of nearshore processes, including wave evolution across the continental shelf to the shoreline, the corresponding breaking-wave-driven circulation, and the subsequent changes to surfzone morphology (e.g., beach erosion and accretion), (and) analysis of nonlinear random processes, especially geophysical time series” as being his research interests.

The 2016 award will fund five years of research that will support future DoD technology development. The grant funds student and post-doctoral researchers in his lab, too, as part of its mandate to train future scientists.

His research team seeks to understand and model waves, currents and the movements of the sands on the shore, in the surf and on the swash, or beach face, according to his professional bio.

"During a previous study of eddies or whirlpools near the shoreline, at about the depth where people get caught in rip currents and drown, we discovered currents can change rapidly in a few minutes and drastically from one place to another place only 15’ away. No one had put many wave and current sensing instruments near each other in the surf before," he said. 

His latest NSSEFF award will fund further research into rapid current change, said Elgar. 

"The research funded by my present NSSEFF award will take place primarily at the US Army’s Field Research Facility, Duck, N.C. Our plan is to use several 'cameras' that can produce images of the sea surface. Cell phone cameras do not work for us. We will engineer and build a specialized lidar system. Lidar sends out a laser beam (eye safe) ... A lidar can tell how far away you are," he said. "We also will use infra-red cameras. As water churns and bubbles in the breaking waves, different temperature water from below rises to the surface and moves around in the currents. We can “see” little eddies and whirlies, and can track them to tell how fast they are going."

The oceanographer used an NSSEFF award he received in 2009 to fund research into currents near the shore. He and his team worked on the project in Puget Sound, Martha's Vineyard and the North Carolina coast.

"We studied how waves and currents move sand on beaches, causing changes to the waves and currents as the moving sand changes the seafloor (sand bars move, beaches erode). Then we studied how a trench or low spot in the beach can cause a rip current, he said. 

He and a student then dug a ditch from the shoreline to the surf, using the giant propellers on a surplus Vietnam-era landing craft.

"The ditch was 300 feet from beach to offshore, 60 feet wide (along the beach) and 10 feet deep. We’d survey it daily, and had sensors all around it. We tried to make a rip current. Man, oh man, we made a huge one," Elgar said.

Ultimately, the goal of his research is to predict current and wave strength and direction as well as beach erosion, according to his PVLab page on the WHOI website.

Although retirement plans are far from his thoughts, returning to Sandpoint to stay someday is certainly on the table.

"I cannot imagine living anywhere else," Elgar said.