Hypoxia has been observed worldwide and causes great damage to marine ecosystems. In the northeastern mariculture areas of the Shandong Peninsula, summer oxygen depletion and even hypoxia have been observed in the bottom layer, but the underlying dynamics are still poorly understood. In the current study, the physical controls of variations in bottom layer oxygen concentrations in summer and their interannual variations in the northeastern mariculture areas of the Shandong Peninsula were first investigated using in situ observations collected during 2016–2020. Over the past 5 years, the dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations of the bottom layer have ranged from 0.8 to 13.0 mg L⁻¹ and exhibited a robust annual cycle, with the lowest value occurring in August. Hypoxia events covering several days were observed intermittently in the summers of 2016 and 2017. Summer oxygen depletion was caused by the combined effects of ocean stratification and enhanced biogeochemical oxygen consumption. At the interannual time scale, stratification and bottom layer DO concentrations showed synchronous variations and both peaked in 2018. The underlying mechanism was related to bottom layer currents, which were created by southerly monsoon winds. Strong/weak southerly surface winds induced a strong/weak bottom shoreward advection of cold, oxygen‐rich water and resulted in strong/weak stratification and high/low DO concentrations. The results provide a good reference for coastal mariculture management in the Shandong Province and enrich our understanding of the global distribution of coastal hypoxia.

The effect of swell waves on atmospheric boundary layer turbulence under low winds was explored using data from a fixed platform located in the South China Sea. The wind spectra, cospectra, and Ogive curve measured at a height of 8 m above the mean sea surface provided direct evidence that wind stress was affected by swell waves. To interpret such phenomena, an improved approach was derived based on the fact that the total wind stress was the vector sum of turbulent stress and wave‐coherent stress. Different from the approaches of earlier studies, our approach did not align the turbulent stress with the mean wind speed. The influence of swell waves on the magnitude and direction of the total wind stress was analyzed using our approach. The results showed that the wave‐coherent stress derived from our data accounted for 32% of the total wind stress. The magnitude and angle of the wind stress changed by swell waves depended on the relative angle between the turbulent stress and swell direction.

A severe coral bleaching event occurred in the Beibu Gulf during boreal summer 2020. This event was caused by record-breaking warm sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the northern South China Sea (NSCS). Anomalous anticyclones (AACs) over the NSCS linked to the Indian Ocean warming and La Niña induced the extreme NSCS warming. In May–July 2020, anomalous anticyclonic-shear easterlies appeared over the tropical western Pacific as a Kelvin wave response to the Indian Ocean warming. These easterlies resulted in an AAC over the NSCS and tropical northwestern Pacific via the Ekman dynamics. Besides, the anomalous easterlies increased moisture fluxes from the Pacific to the Maritime Continent (MC), enhancing the MC convection and thus supporting the NSCS AAC via an anomalous Hadley circulation. In this stage, the increased incident shortwave radiation induced by the NSCS AAC was the major contributor to the NSCS warming. In September 2020, anomalous equatorial Pacific easterlies associated with the La Niña could trigger an NSCS AAC by enhancing the MC convection. The resultant AAC warmed the NSCS SST anomalies mainly by increasing downward latent heat flux and shortwave radiation. Downward heat advection associated with the NSCS AAC also contributed to the extreme NSCS warming.

State-of-the-art multiple-object tracking methods are frequently applied to people or vehicle tracking, but rarely involve underwater-object tracking. Compared with the processing in non-underwater photos or videos, underwater fish tracking is challenging due to variations in light conditions, water turbidity levels, shape deformations, and the similar appearances of fish. This article proposes a robust underwater fish-school tracking algorithm (FSTA). The FSTA is based on the tracking-by-detection paradigm. To solve the problem of low recognition accuracy in an underwater environment, we add an amendment detection module that uses prior knowledge to modify the detection result. Second, we introduce an underwater data association algorithm for aquatic non-rigid organisms that recombines representation and location information to refine the data matching process and improve the tracking results. The Resnet50-IBN network is used as a re-identification network to track fish. We introduce a triplet loss function based on a centroid to train the feature extraction network. The multiple-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) of the FSTA is 79.1% on the underwater dataset, which shows that it can achieve state-of-the-art performance in a complex real-world marine environment.

Near-inertial waves (NIWs) are a kind of internal wave, which are usually generated by synoptic wind forcing and play an important role in the oceanic energy budget. However, the lack of in situ observations limits our understanding of NIWs to some extent. Through a comparison with in situ observations, in this study, we first showed that the hybrid coordinate ocean model reanalysis results could reasonably reproduce the typhoon-induced NIWs, and we then adopted these data to investigate the NIWs induced by typhoon Megi in 2010 in the South China Sea (SCS). The results indicate that Megi-induced near-inertial kinetic energy was mainly concentrated in the SCS Basin. In the vertical direction, Megi-induced NIWs could propagate to 1000 m depth. The damping and modal content of Megi-induced NIWs were site-dependent: In the region near Megi’s track, NIWs were dominated by the first three baroclinic modes and damped quickly; whereas in two zones to the west of the Luzon Island and Luzon Strait, the e-folding time of Megi-induced NIWs could be longer than 20 days and higher modes (mode-4 to mode-7) were enhanced several days after the passage of Megi. Possible mechanisms of these phenomena were also explored in this study.