Rate My Professor Frederick Bingham

Professor Frederick Bingham is a distinguished geoscientist and physical oceanographer at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), where he serves as Professor in the Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography and is affiliated with the Center for Marine Science. He earned a B.A. in Physics from Oberlin College in 1984, a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of California, San Diego in 1990, and a Master of Science in Computer Science and Information Systems from UNCW in 2012. Bingham's professional journey includes a Foreign Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan from 1990 to 1991, Assistant Researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa from 1992 to 1994, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at UNCW from 1994 to 1999, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography from 1999 to 2009, and Professor since 2009. He also held a Visiting Associate Professor position at Tohoku University in 2005.

Bingham's research specializes in sea surface salinity variability, including subfootprint variability, seasonal cycles, barrier layers, upper ocean stratification, air-sea interaction, satellite observations of ocean salinity, circulation, mass water transportation, and the global water cycle. His contributions link ocean salinity to rainfall patterns, flooding, and drought prediction. He co-authored a 2002 paper on sea surface salinity measurements that supported NASA's Aquarius project, attended its 2011 launch, joined NASA's Ocean Salinity Science Team in 2009, participated in the SPURS field campaigns, collaborated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on salinity error quantification (yielding 12 papers and over $500,000 in grants), and contributes to NASA's SASSIE program in the Arctic. Key publications include "The Salinity Pilot-Mission Exploitation Platform (Pi-MEP): A Hub for Validation and Exploitation of Satellite Sea Surface Salinity Data" (2021), "Sea Surface Salinity Subfootprint Variability from a Global High-Resolution Model" (2021), "Variability of the South Pacific Subtropical Surface Salinity Maximum" (2019), and "Barrier Layers in a High-resolution Model in the Eastern Tropical Pacific" (2020). In 2025, he was inducted into UNCW's 5 Million Dollar Club for exceeding $5 million in career external funding and named an Open Access Champion in 2024 for open science advocacy. Earlier, he received a Short-term Invitation Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1999. With over 30 years of experience, Bingham advances oceanographic understanding through interdisciplinary efforts and data management in large NASA and NOAA projects.