 Okay. Welcome everyone. So it's already four and let me just get started. I'm sure more people will be showing up. So today, so I would like to introduce our speaker, Professor Satoshi. Yeah, Professor Satoshi Mitari and to celebrate his recent promotion to tenure full professor and so just a little background of the Provost lecture series. So we started this Provost lecture series in October 2022 and it has been almost one and a half years. So throughout the past 18 months, as you can see, so we cover many of our faculty members. We celebrated their retirement or promotion to associate or full professors. We also invited faculty members who received important awards to celebrate their accomplishment. And so in 2024, so we started this this year, Professor Takahashi recently retired and Professor Yasha Naiman was promoted to associate professor and unfortunately everyone is busy. So we're able to cram into two lectures today and also next Monday. And so we apologize for this back to back arrangement. And so again, as usual, I would like to thank many people who have been very supportive of the Provost lecture series, people from the Office of the Provost and CPR members and also the core facility, especially engineering section Patrick and also Chad for helping to make the gifts. And so today I was I was asked I was asked by Satoshi to introduce him. So I will be very brief and I would like to thank Yumiko Satoshi's wife. Many of you probably know her probably some some of you your kids learn piano lessons from Satoshi's wife Yumiko. So thanks to her she sent me some important pictures so so that I'm able to introduce Satoshi to to illustrate Satoshi's journey. After he graduated, after you got your bachelor's degree from Japan, so I will start from Seattle. And so the first photo that's University of Washington, so we actually have some connection, I realized so I arrived to University of Washington in 2008 I think that's when you yeah after but Satoshi already left. So we were actually in the same department mechanical engineering department and and so this is our kind of the nice the center court area of University of Washington as you can see Satoshi is full of I guess hope and and also apparently he's a very serious baseball fan. So I got several photos but I'm just highlighting too I think you are very engaged I assume you are also a very good baseball player no okay but yeah but in Seattle so so we have the celebrity the baseball player from Japan. And so this is the picture of Satoshi here with his PhD advisor Professor James Riley who is also a very good colleague of mine so we're so when I was a professor at UW we're in the same building on the third floor of the mechanical engineering building and it's very old school there's only one bathroom and and only until I think 1990s before it was only for male professors and but two years before I joined the department they converted that to kind of only open to professors on the third floor but we all have a secret key we can use. So that's the first day when I arrived at UW that's you know James Riley told me yes how I can gain access to the bathroom. And so this is a nice picture to celebrate I think Satoshi received his PhD and he studied the chemical reaction in isotropic turbulence so that's his thesis topic and Satoshi even bought this graduate the UW gum so you have been using it. Okay and I know it's very expensive it's like made of velvet so Satoshi has taste and after Seattle Satoshi moved to Santa Barbara and so that's started his journey as a postal and there he started working on ocean turbulence and also around that period so both Emma and Lynn were born and so you can see some photos the left one thanks again to to Yumiko share these nice photos and in between Satoshi was also trying to write papers and working on his laptop. Yes yeah you still have like baby face. So hold on and after you see Santa Barbara so Satoshi moved to OIST which started in 2009 and Satoshi so based on my knowledge as a neighbor Satoshi is a very neat person he's always washing his cars every other day so I always tell Elliot I said look Satoshi is washing his cars again and our cars nobody washes it and also I learned from Satoshi where to get the triple king size full-tone cover and it's really hard to find I asked the resource center I asked my RUA's nobody had the answer until one day I was talking to Satoshi he told me where to order these very specialized sheets and you can see Satoshi was getting ready maybe to take Lynn and Emma to school with nice school outfit so that's 2011 and as you can see there's a some crossover Satoshi's unit is very popular it's called marine biophysics unit and sometimes students got confused you know the first year rotation students they approached me before they arrived they were like can we do a rotation in your unit so I said yes and then after a few months they told me like oh please don't be angry we we were actually interested in NBU see my unit the abbreviation is NB and you and over time I also understand why because Satoshi is a great mentor and a colleague see look at all the great parties he has room you know celebrating with food and also with music I heard it's always very lively and last year Satoshi was promoted to full professor and so that's a big accomplishment and as you can see right after so so Satoshi or his daughters convinced Satoshi to get a very special puppy from Raikkon the mall on the first floor and so this is a designer dog and the name is Moka so I know Satoshi I see now you have been walking Moka with Emma and your kids all the time so so I say Moka is a partner for exploring the land after you master the sea so in addition I want to show this really funny photo so last year probably everybody remembers so we have this really bad typhoon incident and so yeah so a lot of damage because our so we're neighbors living in the seaside faculty seaside house compound and but Satoshi's house got the most damage as you can see during the middle of the night the door was blown open and we heard you and Yumiko had to hold the door until the help arrived and so so so I say why did the oceanographer's door got blown off during the typhoon because even the sea wanted to learn from the best so without further ado Satoshi we look congratulations and we look forward to learning more about your journey all right thank you for the nice introduction Amy and those are kind of unexpected and you said you are not going to embarrass me but you did but yeah so those are really nice you know refreshing I refresh my memory and yes those are the journeys I have been through and you know today I want to this is not gonna be a really scientific presentation so I want to share with you a history or evolution of my research unit the marine biophysics unit so I thought that this is gonna be a more useful and also enjoyable for most of you so as Amy explained I joined OIST in September 2009 long time ago as an independent new investigator I don't know how many of you actually know that Shimano Kisan you remember that it is called INIs so remember that OIST was not a graduate university yet so INIs were converted to a tenure track assistant professor after OIST became a graduate university and as Amy explained I did my PhD at UDUB I studied fluid mechanics, chemically reacting turbulent flows, then I did my post-socket use system to Barbara so I switched my field from fluid mechanics to marine science or marine ecology and I did this change actually I made this change before I actually applied for a PhD program based upon the suggestions from my friend in Tokyo so idea was to have a concrete background in one spring before jumping on to interdisciplinary science I am interested in the role of ocean turbulence in regulating biological processes at the different scales from like centimeters to hundreds of kilometers I want to understand the coupling of a biological processes and the physical processes in the oceans so my post-socket supervisor Dave Siego actually suggested that my research unit name the marine biophysics unit based upon my research interests and I accepted that without understanding what it really means okay so this nice picture shows the OIST campus in 2018 but none of these existed when I arrived at OIST so where was the marine biophysics unit in 2009 do you remember Shimane-Ki-san we are here at the OIST Seaside House we actually use one of the guest rooms as our office space but you know INI's independent new investigators are allowed to have only two staff members so this is actually a large enough so I recruited one technician and one postdoc and one internship student from France so this is a marine biophysics unit in 2009 Wolf Skogland actually moved in arrived at the OIST pretty much at the same time so he was actually using a room right next to me so for those who know Wolf well you probably can imagine how much time he spent in my office every day so he became a really good friend and we moved to love one in 2010 and share the space there and in 2012 actually my research unit moved to love two so this brochure shows the list of PIs when or soon after I joined OIST so there are only 27 PIs back then how do you probably remember this state yeah so there were three INIs Holga Yankee Kodama arrived first then I arrived and soon after that Sasha Mickey arrived and unfortunately I'm the only one who is still remaining at OIST I guess they have a better life anyway so the number of the PIs actually increased to 35 by November 2011 and the brochure became two pages like this is page one who joined I guess Evan joined Dennis oh Nick said to on the page to so you see Fuji a joined at this time and Tadashi joined and Mattias to so this is a list of the PIs in 2011 and this was the time OIST was growing really rapidly and I know that I got them lots of gray hairs compared to the picture here but you know looking at the this brochure maybe I'm not the only one so okay so I proposed a small project in the marine ecology so central problem in the marine ecology is to describe marine population dynamics at the beautiful marine habitats such as coral reefs and also care for us in the constantly changing physical ocean graphic environment so many marine species have a planktonic lava life stage during which larvae can be transported to over hundreds of kilometers over months so larvae are transported by ocean circulations during which they actually develop their competency for the next life stage the only lucky larvae that are transported to a suitable habitat during their competency can settle there and recruit to adult populations so this lava dispersal is a predominant means that connect distant habitats and drive marine population dynamics now this lava dispersal has been often modeled by a simple diffusion models in which the larvae spread out nicely around their native areas as if it were molecular diffusion process but actually the marine life is embedded in a turbulent ocean so this is a picture spiral eddy of the coast of Japan you see a big eddy and the chlorophyll distributions in the South Atlantic again you see lots of eddy motions eddies in the black sea and the chlorophyll distributions in the California current you see that coastal eddies are dominating and there are some data link the lava dispersal and the oceanic eddies so black vectors indicate an eddy here and the red bars indicate the observed lava fish abundance so the the lava fish abundance peaked near the center of the eddy meaning that the actually oceanic eddies transport larvae as a coherent packet so my proposed research was to quantify dispersal processes around Okinawa and also described coral and their predators crowns on starfish population dynamics so for example this movie shows a 30-day trajectory of 282 ocean drifting buoys deployed from Okinawan coral reefs the blue lines indicate a 30-day trajectories and you can see that you know some of these drifters actually entered the strong western boundary current the crucial current you see a like straight straight like lines on the left-hand side of the figure that's a crucial current and some drifters actually went all the way to mainland Japan and approach the Tokyo area but as you can see actually not so many drifting buoys entered the crucial the most of them are stayed around Okinawa making a really complicated spaghetti like patterns which actually is reflecting the motion of oceanic eddies but to really understand the population dynamics of the corals and the courts I really needed somebody who understand the marine biology so I collaborated with the marine biologists from the Seisoko station of the University of the Ryukyu's Seisoko station was established in 1971 and many international and also domestic researchers students visit there to conduct physiological studies of marine organisms I mostly collaborated to be the director back then professor Kazuhiko Sakai and I recruited one of his former students Masako Nakamura as my first postdoc and the Masako is now ten years associate professor at the Tokai University so we monitored the coral and the Cramson Starfish recruitment numbers at the Kume Island and also the Kerama Islands and Okinawa Island which I really enjoyed a lot and later on another postdoc joined Yuichina Kazima he actually added the population genetics to our project in collaboration with Nori Sato so this is a plan and we are happily working on that you know when I joined OIST Sydney Brenner was the first president and Sydney gave me a lot of nice suggestions and one of the things Sydney recommended to us to have my first OIST workshop with his friends informaticians from Edinburgh so I followed his suggestions and I organized a workshop in 2010 but actually I had no idea what to do with informaticians I had no contact with informaticians so I asked Sydney okay Sydney I'm going to do the workshop but what is the scope of this workshop his answer was the scope of this workshop is to find it out so I was really confused but you know like about ten years later you know I started to understand what he meant by looking at the regular more and more applications of machine learning to the like Earth science including marine science just like Gerald you are doing here at the OIST I finally understood when I spoke to you so Sydney was talking about it at this time in 2010 and by the way this is a famous marine biologist Bob Warner he's the one who convinced me to apply for OIST so in 2011 I got involved in the so-called R&D cluster project funded by the cabinet office so Nori Sato and several other PIs were also included in this R&D cluster project so everyone has different objectives my part of this project was to assist the establishment of marine science hub in Okinawa by taking advantage of natural resources of Okinawa such as coral reefs, typhoons and also hydrothermal vents but before I talk much about this R&D cluster project I want to clarify one thing so you know what the marine science is the marine science is the I cannot read it the scientific study of the oceans it is an earth science which covers a wide range of topics including ecosystem dynamics ocean currents waves geophysical fluid dynamics and etc etc so it covers a wide area and it overlaps with marine biology and also ecology marine biology is a study over what over the over the I need a glass oh no of the biology of marine life organisms in the sea so it focuses on the biology not the ocean and ecology is the study of the relationship of man living organisms including including humans and their physical environment it's about marine organisms and the environment they all these overlap but marine science is not equal to marine biology or ecology it's just bit bigger than that and also for your information when the cabinet office mentions ocean so this is what they have in their mind so if you go to their web page there's explanation for the basic plan on the ocean policy the unfortunately most materials are provided only in Japanese but there is an English material as well just like this summary slide so you can read through this later on but in short they expect us the scientist to promote the R&D of marine science and technology and also maintain and strengthen ocean surveys observations monitoring so having these in mind how could we contribute to the R&D cluster project to assist the establishment of a marine science hub by taking advantage of these natural resources so Kinawa's beauty beautiful coral reefs lie at the northern boundary of the Pacific Ocean the Kalama pier indicate a number of coral species the center part the triangle shape is called the coral triangle great value of reef is you know a big player in the study of marine ecology and marine biology in coral reefs and the more a long-term ecological research site has been established in 2004 by a US National Science Foundation to understand coral reef ecosystems the University of Hawaii operates the Pacific Island Ocean observing system and also let's not forget about the universal nucleus they have more than 50 years of history for the study of coral reef biology and also ecology Okinawa's coral reefs are also impacted by typhoons tropical cyclones so Kinawa is situated in a typhoon alley the region with the most frequent and fully developed tropical cyclones on Earth so this map shows trucks and the intensity of all tropical cyclones over 20 years 1985 2005 color indicator intensity so red corresponds to category 5 hurricane so tropical cyclones are most and intensified around Okinawa and because of the global warming that are tropical cyclones will be even more intensified in the future and Okinawa occasionally encounter this the series of typhoons I don't know if you are here in 2012 we had the five typhoons in August 2012 just in one month every weekend do you remember that hurry yeah and then you know the power outage lasted like four days does disaster and we occasionally have these things you know the left movie shows the first three typhoons white one shows the last two typhoons all in one month it was really every weekend so Kinawa is also located to cross to these things hydrosomal bent feels that the supporter ecosystems of exotic species that do not depend on the photosynthesis okay the land 400 degree Celsius of water hot water is coming out from the bottom of the ocean through these hydrosomal vents including hydrogen sulfide and also other minerals which eventually form rich deposits of gold silver copper rare metal and so on and these hydrosomal vents are distributed like this there are two tectonic types the bent feels in the western Pacific no eastern Pacific and also the mid in Atlantic Ocean distributed that the mid-ocean reaches where the plates are being created and also moving about and those on the western Pacific side actually are distributed along the sub subduction zone so hydrosomal bends on the this side was actually can be found on the arc and the backpack basins hydrosomal bent was first discovered at this point east Pacific lies by the Utsuho ocean graphic institution in 1977 and Jamsic Japan Agency for marine science and technology based at the Yokosuka not too far away from Tokyo has been investigating the north-west north-west hydrosomal bent feels intensively and the pilot test of mining and the pumping of hydrosomal deposit actually took place in Okinawa 12 in 2017 for the first time in the history so to conduct any marine science research we need to secure secure on access to the oceans not only the coastal ocean but including the open ocean too so we made a joint research agreement with Jamsic to secure access to hydrosomal bends in Okinawa 12 so in 2012 I actually designed my own research expeditions using Jamsic research vessels to collect biological samples from hydrosomal bends and to install a bunch of a physical ocean graphic instruments and you know two researchers from a Goriani unit and Sato unit were also joined this research cruise so this is really exciting that all we did was actually staying in the bay in Amami Island drinking eating talking about the week guess why you already saw it there was a slow-moving typhoon that stayed around Okinaw for about one week so we couldn't do anything but after that in 2017 you know three postdocs two students and myself joined three different research expeditions and you know like a research expeditions for my student at the postdocs were great guess what happened to the expedition I joined we got the two typhoons so the wave height was can you believe that seven meters all night so my upper watch gave me a all source of compliments because it's sort I was doing exercise all night but anyway so this collaboration went well and also made a joint research agreement with Okinawa prefecture government's Fisheries Research Center they have been investigating the crucial current in the last 30 years or so so we joined their crucial crucial investigations and we deployed some instruments from their research vessel to and the former postdoc of mine Daisuke Hasegawa played a central role in this collaboration and he is now a tenured researcher at National Research no National National Fisheries Research Institute in Tohoku and he is still investigating the crucial current and this center was kind enough to let Tumoru Shintake to test out his title power generation equipment we also made a cooperative agreement with the Japan Coast Guard which enabled the more frequent ocean observations around Okinawa so we made agreement with the 11th Coast Guard regional Coast Guard headquarters in 2012 and you may remember this but we made another agreement with the Naha Coast Guard office lately so international collaborations actually are not it's really a common thing in the marine science because the oceans are too big to be covered by one institute so we are actually hosted the oyster workshops three times in six years 2012 13 and 16 and two of them actually co-funded by the US National Science Foundation so two workshops are organized with the Moria long-term ecological research group and also Professor Kazuko Sakai from the University of the Ryukyu and the one workshop was organized with the Utsuho Ocean Graphic Institution and also Jamstek to study the hydro thermal vents on the western Pacific ocean so these workshops and international collaboration led to synthetic papers so here's one example what we did here was we put all coral recruitment data together from many different regions color coded by color coded in this figure and we we assessed how the coral reef are changing in the world and we use these settlement plates to count the number of coral recruiting coral larvae so what we found out was coral reefs are actually shifting away from the equator here is another example we assess the connectivity of hydro thermal vent fields in the western Pacific Ocean here's a white circles indicate 11 different geographically independent regions and the color indicate the direction of connectivity blue indicate the northward purple is also indicate the northward and the green indicates the westward connections so you can see that these regions are connected mostly in the unidirectional way and according to our estimates these connections happen very infrequently once every five thousand two ten thousand years this is a close-up views of the connectivity within an Okinawa trove manned spacing and the low basin the hydro thermal bands within these the backpack basins are well connected without any particular directionality and there are gaps in the southwest Pacific Ocean but these gaps can be connected for species with a longer than average plankton cloud iterations but these connections happen even more infrequently like once every hundred thousand years so when we do the deep sea mining we should have these things in the mind so we successfully secure the access to the oceans and we develop the international collaboration and we generated some synthetic studies on the coral reefs in the world and also hydro thermal vent on the western Pacific Ocean but did we really respond to the goal of this islandic cluster project maybe we made a network but I'm not sure if this was going to lead to a research hub so we wondered if we can do anything by taking advantage of most frequent and fully developed typhoons or tropical cyclones on earth the ocean responses to tropical cyclones actually remain a central problem in marine science we are not talking about like typhoon predictions or weather forecast talking about the ocean responses to typhoons typhoons mixed up ocean as you probably well know so it's been well known that typhoons mixed up ocean creating or reducing the temperature of the sea surface drastically so here is one of the first satellite to derived the infrared images of the sea surface the color indicator sea surface temperature and the right panel shows the sea surface temperature after the passage of typhoon hurricane gloria in 1985 almost 40 years ago and the left panel shows the sea surface temperature before the hurricane passage the middle one shows the temperature difference between left and right so temperature actually dropped about one to five degrees Celsius during this passage of hurricane okay so this shows a nice oceanic response to typhoon winds but the question is why do we need to care this you know the sea surface temperature will go back to the normal condition in days or weeks and that is actually true but it may not be the case below the sea surface you know typhoons mix up ocean homogenizing temperature to certain depths meaning it cools down the surface water but it warms up the deeper waters and these warmed up water warmed up waters as indicated in this schematic diagram may actually remain beyond the winters winter season and until the next typhoon season so marine scientists actually do care these ocean heat content so it really typhoon really matters in that sense also let me explain that the ocean responses to typhoon by using these ocean drifting buoys once again the orange spheres correspond to the locations of the these are ocean drifting buoys and the blue lines indicate a seven-day trajectories and you are going to see the yellow line shortly that indicates the track of the typhoon Gerard in 2012 2012 so I guess this is one of those five typhoons in August 2012 so that went actually right on the Okinawa Island and this is how the ocean drifting buoys responded to typhoons so what do you see here so if you look at the ocean drifting buoys on the right-hand side of the typhoon truck it actually rotated clockwise like that and the rotation period was about 25 hours but if you look at the ocean drifting buoys on the left-hand side of the typhoon truck they do not rotate why this is happening so let me explain that why it is happening because earth rotates that's that's answer you know the guy is going to throw a ball on the rotating round-bottom pan and you're going to look at how they look like from the cameras attached to this rotating pan so this is it okay guys throwing a ball if you look at the cameras that rotate with a round-bottom pan looks like this it shows the clockwise rotating or like the circular motions this is called the inertial oscillation the inertial oscillation is found in the oceans because earth rotates similarly to this rotating pan okay but why typhoon calls the inertial oscillation only on the right-hand side of the typhoon truck actually typhoons cause the resonance of inertial oscillation you know to make a resonance you have to apply forces to materials in the right direction at the right timings on the right-hand side of the typhoon truck typhoon winds actually tend to push balls or drifters or anything in the clockwise directions on the left-hand side typhoons try to rotate the balls in counter-clockwise direction and because of the directions earth rotations inertial oscillation in the northern hemisphere is always clockwise so this is why the resonance of inertial oscillation happens only on the right-hand side of the typhoon truck so let me show you how common this inertial oscillation is using the ocean circulation models responding to typhoon winds typhoon wind products provided by the Japan meteorological agency JMA it the color indicator sea surface temperature the gray ish arrows indicate the first of first surface ocean currents faster than like 80 centimeter per second and the black arrows indicate represent the typhoon summer here in this case in 2012 so you can see that the surface water ocean rotated on the east side or on the right-hand side of this typhoon truck and this movie shows the ocean responses to two more typhoons following the left movies actually so left left left movies actually from September 14th through 25 the right one is right after that September 27th through October 22nd so the surface ocean was rotating a lot but not everywhere but on the right-hand side of the typhoon truck and this means if the simulations are correct the surface ocean in the east part of the Okinawa island was rotating from September 14th to October 22nd over one month so it's a common thing so to really understand these oceanic responses to typhoons energy transfer from typhoon winds to the upper ocean needs to be quantified accurately for that the simultaneous monitoring of the typhoon winds and also the upper ocean current is needed and you know the big more offshore platforms in those pictures can actually do that and here is the observation and you don't need to understand this big need this figure but if you look at the x-axis x-axis indicates the wind speed wind speed actually do not does not exceed 25 meters meter per second corresponding to typhoon winds meaning typhoons or tropical cyclones actually rarely hit these more more the offshore platforms so because we are in a situated in a typhoon early maybe we can extend this graph so we can try a simultaneous monitoring of a wind and currents and we tried that but not using these more the offshore platforms they're expensive so we use a newer more affordable autonomous ocean observing platform the wave glider so the wave glider consists of two parts surface float and the submerged wings they are connected by the cable surface float is equipped with the solar panels here and the control box communication device I don't remember what this was and the one weather station and acoustic Doppler current providers okay so wave gliders allows us allows us to observe atmospheric and ocean graphic field and extremely dangerous conditions far from the shore so we can control that remotely and also in real time and it's not that expensive submerged wings convert wave energy into thrust like in this movie okay so the water speed is actually about 50 centimeter per second now I want to show you our first and probably most successful typhoon observations so aim to enter the eye area of the two typhoons in 2013 typhoon feet on your left and the typhoon Dennis on your right and actually you can find the feet all in the Dennis movie so that's maybe you can see that once again so this is Dennis and you see feet all ahead of Dennis so they passed Okinawa Island only separated by a day so we first directed our wave glider to feet all but the when we learned that the Dennis actually had turned into a tropical cyclone wave gliders here on the October 5th we decided to you know give up a plan for feet all and directed wave glider into Dennis because Dennis was much closer so in two days the wave glider was here on October 7th made the closest encounter with typhoon Dennis when the typhoon center was at this point and in these two days wave glider actually shifted over 100 kilometers and after this close encounter actually we couldn't control the wave glider it started to drift showing a nice inertia oscillation becoming a really expensive drifting buoy and five days later our friends the Japan Coast Guard actually retrieved the wave glider for us for free we didn't need to pay that so this is a picture showing that Japan Coast Guard approach the wave glider from their patrol vessel and lifted the surface float the current profilers on the bottom of the surface float looked fine lots of shellfish were attached to the surface float we even found some juvenile crabs on board the wave glider was hundreds of kilometers away from the course I have no idea how the crabs could reach the surface float submerged wings were lifted and we found out the cable connecting the surface float and submerged wings actually became tangled around the submerged wings now after this we believe we couldn't control the wave glider so it started to drift away so precipitation maps obtained by a Japan meteorological agencies Doppler radar Doppler radar actually confirmed that our wave glider entered the area of a typhoon so Karamapia shows the precipitation millimeter per hour every three hours from panel ABCDEF okay and the red points indicate the location of the wave glider so if you look at this panel so wave glider was in the typhoon eye area so when plotted in the moving coordinate system with its with a its origin at the typhoon center and the y-axis in the typhoon's direction then the locations and observed the winds look like this so typhoon wind was actually not symmetric around the eye the blue vectors indicate the surface ocean currents about three meter below the sea surface the surface current was actually faster like the behind the typhoon center these are the close-up views of the typhoon eyes the surface winds and surface currents were not really aligned at all around the eyes so as you see we successfully captured the surface winds and the surface current simultaneously this was the first time in the history so we are really proud of it but the since we are marine biophysics unit so we want to see the coupling between the biological processes and the physical processes so we also investigated the biological responses to typhoons while monitoring you know all sorts of physical biological and chemical properties captured by these sensors and the biological responses were examined using images obtained from video plankton recorders here are some examples a concealer is a group of a radio radium protozoa so they are abundant around Okinawa all year long and their skeletons are made of strontium I don't know why they chose strontium but it's great and there are they also contain photosynthetic bacteria in it and one of my students Maggie bus mouth brisping looked into this species really carefully among other things here's another example trichudesmium trichudesmium is a colony of cyanobacteria you can find them from spring to fall around Okinawa this picture shows that trichudesmium bloom like off the coast of a great barrier reef trichudesmium actually has a special ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia which is actually really important for tropical and subtropical oceans where the nutrient supply is limited so my former postdoc Mary Grossman investigated the plankton abundance change along with some like physics parameters properties like a wave height and the biological parameters like bio and chlorophyll concentrations throughout the series of typhoons in 2013 and I'm going to show you the plankton abundance change during the first one typhoon torch and also typhoon Dennis which I already showed you earlier so merely categorize the images obtained by plankton record are into 12 different groups okay the trichudesmium and radio radians are one group independently and there are 10 more groups and the green lights here green numbers here indicate the change in the abundance for each category during typhoon torch so you can see that actually many groups increased during typhoon torch some increase more than 100% so red numbers here indicate the changes in abundance during typhoon Dennis some group increase but differently from the case for typhoon torch and actually some group disappeared we cannot explain why this happened but we suspect one of the reason is is I guess the our sampling location relative to the typhoon truck our sampling location was the right-hand side of torch and the left-hand side of Dennis so that might be one of the reasons so these typhoon observations during the R&D cluster project actually attracted many scientists so we started the joint typhoon observations in Okinawa with the entity a large Japanese telecommunication companies they provided the new wave glider we didn't pay for that Amy so and also the two professors from the Kyoto University is disaster prevention disaster what is the name disaster prevention Institute and they brought in a 10 wave monitoring buoys and we didn't pay for it so and also we probably two more research centers are going to join our typhoon observations in 2020 or later so if we really want to have a research center we may want to take advantage of typhoons somehow because typhoon studies somehow attract researchers to Okinawa so during this R&D cluster project the marine biophysics unit expanded and in 2017 at the end of the R&D cluster project marine biophysics unit had four post-docs three technicians six students two interns and two part-time assistants covering a wide range of research topics so I tried to spend more time on my students and postdocs during after 2017 and in 2022 we had a research unit review for years of 2021 through 2017 through through a 2021 four or five year period we had a 35 publications and I just want to briefly mention two of them which I'm really proud of one project is actually designed by my via my former postdoc Angela Alice she's actually there and also one of my former students Maggie they looked into how typhoons actually make changes cause changes in the bacterial communities in Okinawa's coral reefs and they especially looked into the responses to so-called red soil runoff and this paper was actually introduced as a must read article in a microbiologist magazine and I really like this project you know Angela and Maggie wanted to have something some project in which all marine biophysics unit members can participate and it worked out very nicely and another one is an extension of our western Pacific hydro thermal bench studies so we published a synthetic paper together with a professor Lisa Levin from Scripps Institution so this work was introduced as in for policy brief for meeting of our International Seabed Authority in 2020 we tried our best to bring in external funding and these are the funding led by the marine biophysics unit members and one of my former postdocs Yosuke Yamada did pretty well he brought in the four fundings including a prestigious JST forest ground we got a lot of visitors 40 visitors including a six interns and three visiting students some notable ones are like Andres Anderson from the Scripps Institution of Ocean Graphic SIO Amatsuya Genin from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stephen Monizumi's from Stanford this collaboration actually led to bigger grant later on from US NOAA and Amatsuya Genin actually served as a core supervisor for Kota Ishikawa so Kota looked investigate investigated how the ocean turbulence affect fish feeding behaviors also we threw out the sanding from also SIO came to Okinawa responding to my request they actually created the really fine-scale three-dimensional map of coral reefs around Okinawa just like in this movie so this is actually coral reefs I think you will see the shape eventually and they have a three-dimensional like coordinates with species information at each location idea is we look at the changes over five year time period the marine biophysics unit student postdocs really loved outreach activities they did the 25 school visits and the six public lectures that's really amazing and we are also awarded for the developing the tidal focus system for the Kerama Islands by the Japan Coast Guard and we appeared in the media time to time and you might remember there was a massive beaching of a promise in October 2021 and I explained how long this was going to last and also I explained why we had a massive beaching in 2021 but not the 35 years ago when the same underwater volcano had eruptions so after this I was introduced as a promise expert but which I'm not so this picture shows the MVU members are actually doing a went to a FM Yomitang gave a you know nice broadcast on on like marine conservation for Okinawa during this time the three students graduated Evan Economo and the I course of advice the Patricia Webfa and Maggie after completing a PhD she got a prestigious postdoc fellowship from Fui Wutsuo ocean graphic institution and she's now assistant professor at the University of South Florida and Bob is a postdoc at the academia cynical and the four postdocs departed during this time all of my students at postdoc did really well and thanks to their efforts we got the really highest evaluation from the external reviewers as of today the six plus one students got the PhD from the marine biophysics unit I also co-supervisor one student from Oxford and Kota Ishikawa and Otis Prana are going to join the graduation ceremony this May so I have to think about the speech for them which is a bit a headache but anyway so with that I'd like to finish my presentation thank you very much for listening Satoshi for this really providing this really informative journey we have time for some questions from the audience okay so maybe I will start that's what I learned you know there's the silence I I I have to say something at the beginning but I'm really I remember your paper published about the soil runoff with you know the the bacteria and so on at the time I think when I saw this article I'm wondering is it still safe to swim in the ocean especially the beach close to us that's a very good question and I have to answer to the question very carefully right and yes how should I answer I think it's important to gather the data and you know like I would say like for example I remember being in the California coast we wanted to get in the cold in the water they say no swim because yesterday you know so that there is like something that is already established I don't think we have enough data to know that should be careful especially after the rain maybe in a couple days maybe not soon after the typhoon for many reasons I think Angela is really conservative here when we talk privately she was talking more than that okay but yeah we should be careful there we found some pathogens you know right after the typhoon's heavy rains so we should avoid those times but as Angela said we don't have enough scientific data so we need to compile those data and if we can make some suggestions to local stakeholders even fishermen yeah thank you very important yes do we have any questions about the contamination of water that's certainly something that is done on a regular basis in many waters around Australia particularly Sydney Harbor that I'm familiar with and that's carried out by government bodies as well as by research institutes there and there's a regular warnings to locals about water quality so that's something that I could do right also I have to say thank you very much for the Kerama currents modeling and I would like to attest to its utility in helping us well not when we came second a couple of sailing races that I would the currents around the Kerama Islands are very very tricky right and that's how you win or lose a sailing race but I would therefore ask you not to publicize it too much because we don't want the other skippers learning thank you I didn't think that way and so you're saying maybe I could make money for selling those yeah consultant right right you know Angela is now working for innovation so maybe we should talk about that do we have any other questions from the audience so related to the runoff is like I mean normally runoff is a function of urbanization the more you pave the more runoff you have and then but it's like the first event is usually bad if there's a following event close and close a position it's not as bad I was just wondering like because we have a lot of different areas in Okinawa that are very different in terms of urbanization you actually see a gradient across like say can you compare the north versus the south this is again like a more like a question to Angela but yes we have been working on that like Angela did the sampling at the three different locations including including like really urbanized regions and rural areas and we are comparing we took a really background information how those like water properties and the bacterial communities change over time and we're going to assess how the like storms or like season changes are going to affect the water quality and we are looking into that and we just submitted the paper right right yeah yeah so I can explain more later can you think of like use like application for machine learning techniques for those you do and you're not going to share the idea with me all right great thank you so Satoshi I have one question moving forward so you have shown you know from 2011 17 and to now so are you planning to work on something new and different starting 2024 yes and yeah one of the things I briefly mentioned about it but together with my US collaborators we are going to look into how the coastal circulation processes are affecting the carbon chemistry in the coral reef waters so this is funded by Noah and we have to assess how for example like aquaculture is actually impacting the carbon chemistry in the coral reef waters so we are going to work on that so that's related to the seaweed farms or that's something different this is related to seaweed farm and also this is included in in a COI next project center of innovation I don't remember next part but there okay so that's it and also I have been communicating with we're Hilo Center for advancement of ocean graphic research from the University of Hawaii so we are we just started our discussions but we will probably develop some kind of collaboration with them so I'm working on that yeah that sounds very exciting thank you do we have any other questions comments so if not let's thank Satoshi for this really wonderful and engaging talk so before we leave for coffee and snacks I'm supposed to present this plaque we the core facility members made for you I have to also come up with something you can read it after all right thank you yeah picture time oh okay you too okay thank you yeah