The Jervis Bay Project was set up to undertake baseline studies of the key habitats and species in Jervis Bay on the New South Wales coast, and to develop a monitoring program to assist with long-term management of the bay. It was funded by the Department of Defence who at that time planned to relocate the fleet base of the Royal Australian Navy to Jervis Bay, and although this plan was abandoned mid-way through the study, the study was completed and the final report published in 1994.
A series of 12 projects were proposed, with the 8th, 'Water Circulation of Jervis Bay' being undertaken by the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). The initial aims of this project were to obtain current and wind observations from Jervis bay over a six week period in order to detail the wind driven circulation and provide a data set for comparison with the numerical modelling work being simultaneously undertaken. However, after this initial experiment it became clear that there were significant currents in the bay that are not simply related to direct wind forcing. Therefore, alternative mechanisms for driving the flow had to be investigated, through the measurement programs and data analysis, as well as through numerical modelling. The result was a series of approximately six separate experiments aiming to define the water circulation around the bay and through the bay entrance, to gain an understanding of the processes that drive the currents, and to investigate the influence of stratification on the nature of the currents.
Two experiments concentrated on the flow patterns within the bay. The first during the summer months when the bay is normally thermally stratified, from 6th December 1988 to 11th January 1989, and the second during winter when thermal stratification is generally much weaker, from 10th July to 30th October 1990. Between these two experiments, moorings were maintained in the bay entrance and on the shelf, from April 1989 to April 1990, in order to investigate exchange processes between the bay and shelf waters. Further, to better understand the partition of energy from the wind through the water column, two deployments were made with an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler that gives current time series at 1m depth intervals over most of the water column. A summer deployment of the Doppler profiler was run from December 1990 to January 1991 and a winter deployment was run from July to September 1991. Approximately once per month throughout the three year period, 1989-1991, temperature-salinity surveys were conducted within the bay and out across the shelf to provide additional information on the water exchange and circulation.
Available to download through this record is a pdf outlining the structure and hierarchy of metadata records relating to this project. Also available are the pdfs of the published working papers documenting the research. There are seven subsiduary records that directly relate to this over-arching record (see hierarchical tree):
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