What is physical oceanography?

Our earth has only one ocean which is covering the planet. The ocean is divided into three named parts by agreement, Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. Atlantic ocean is located between the continent of America and Africa, Pacific ocean can be found between the continent of Asia and America, and Indian ocean is located below the South Asia. The ocean has been our source of life and main topic of science for thousands of years. In fact, we are using the ocean to gain food, transport, obtain oil and gas, do sport and recreation, and understand weather. Thereby, some studies are needed to understand our ocean, oceanography is one of them. With oceanography, we can study the character of the ocean as an evironment so we are able to predict the future of anything that will happen in the ocean. As oceanography happens to be general, there are some studies which are more specific like biological oceanography, chemical oceanography, geological oceanography, and physical oceanography.

            Physical oceanography makes us understand about physical properties and dynamics of the ocean. Physical oceanography involves some factors which take place at the ocean, those are temperature, wind characteristic, depth, wave, tidal wave, current, biomass, salinity, etc. These factors are required to gather data and model our ocean. For instance, determining the depth of an ocean can help us to build an offshore structure with a specific type that will adjust correctly in the ocean. In this case, the depth of the ocean shall be measured first by several methods such as echo sounding and satellite altimetry. Despite the cost required for echo sounding is way more expensive than satellite altimetry, echo sounding appeared to be more accurate in measuring the depth of ocean rather than the other one. Echo sounder device works by transmitting sound pulses in to the ocean and recording the interval time as the pulses collected by the receiver. Furthermore, the data of depth of the ocean can determine the ocean floor and classify the depths in to shelf, slope, basin, canyon, plain, ridge, seamount, sill, and trench.

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