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John Hughes Clarke

Professor
Office 217

Center for Coastal & Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center
Jere A. Chase Ocean Engineering Lab
24 Colovos Road
Durham, New Hampshire 03824

603.862.5505 (tel)
603.862.0839 (fax)

John Hughes Clarke works as part of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. There he is a Professor jointly appointed in the departments of Earth Sciences and Mechanical Engineering.

John was formally trained in geology and oceanography in the UK and Canada (Oxford, Southampton and Dalhousie). He's spent the last 29 years, however, focusing on ocean mapping methods. His underlying interest lies in resolving seabed sediment transport mechanisms.

Hughes Clarke’s role at CCOM is to build a research program based on aspects of multibeam mapping, focusing on those topics that currently best meet the needs of the Office of Coast Survey. His research covers multibeam data processing, integration, quality assurance, water column imaging, seafloor classification and seabed change detection. As an integral part of his role, he teaches two core courses (OE874 Seabed Mapping and OE896 Oceanography for Hydrographers) within the Ocean Mapping education program.

John’s current research interests are focused on:

  • Multispectral backscatter—Looking at the frequency dependence of seabed backscatter in the range 30 to 300 kHz. This is done in collaboration with NOAA and the Irish Marine Institute.
     
  • Imaging fine-scale oceanographic structure using multibeam water column—The interest includes both in the oceanographic processes (internal waves, mixing etc.) and their resulting distortion of seabed data due to unresolved refraction effects. A particular focus is image processing to extract coherent oceanographic structure from amongst other noise sources.
     
  • Seabed change discrimination—Monitoring the growth of seabed channels by turbidity current activity. Evaluating the resultant biases in the integrated mapping systems to establish the practical limit of change detection.

John Hughes Clarke's Recent Publications