Adriano Giangiardi successfully defended his undergraduate honors thesis on December 14, 2022. With the thesis titled “The Interannual Variability of the Brazil Current System”,  Adriano was advised by Prof. Ilson Silveira (University of São Paulo, Brazil), MSc. Leilane Passos (University of Bergen, Norway) and Prof Amit Tandon (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth). In this work, Adriano used the outputs of a global reanalysis product to compute the volume transport of the western boundary currents off Brazil over 27 years.  His analysis shows that while the Brazil Current (BC) is not changing at 22°S, it is surprisingly strengthening at 34°S. Furthermore, the BC showed a moderate correlation with El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Part of this thesis was developed when Adriano visited us in Tandon lab at UMass Dartmouth during Spring 2022. The impact of Adriano’s work can be seen through the honorable mention for Exact and Earth Sciences at the undergraduate symposium of the University of São Paulo in Brazil and the best poster award in physical oceanography session at the Intercampus Marine Science (IMS) symposium held at UMass Dartmouth in March 2022.

Congratulations Adriano!

Adriano with his title slide after his successful defense.

Research Professor Christian E. Buckingham (PI) and Professor Amit Tandon (Co-investigator) have been awarded $480,694 for the project, “INTeRnal waves In angular momeNtum StratifICation (INTRINSIC),” by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

An important discovery in the oceanography community has been the realization that centripetal accelerations, or curvature, can modify the stability of fluid parcels within fronts.  Curvature can be shown to locally modify the frequency, dispersion, and hence propagation of internal waves (IWs). Owing to where such waves lose energy or break, this can have a significant impact on energy, buoyancy, and tracer fluxes between the ocean and atmosphere. INTRINSIC aims to study this topic by systematically examining a simplified model of a curved front, together with numerical simulations of the same, in order to better understand the dispersion, propagation, and fate of IWs within the ocean. 

More on the project here.

Congratulations Profs. Buckingham and Tandon!

A few members of the Tandon Lab attended the recently concluded FilaChange conference which was conducted as a precursor to the upcoming SWOT mission. This conference was held at four different locations (Providence, Paris, Hobart and Qingdao), with the members attending the Providence session. Iury Simoes-Sousa gave a talk on his work on how the mixed layer eddies can supply nutrients and therefore facilitate spring time blooms. Filipe Pereira presented a talk on his work on the quasi-stationary meander and its ecological implications in the western South Atlantic. Sid Kerhalkar presented a poster on the Diurnal Warm Layer dynamics in the Bay of Bengal.

Dr. Pietri was also attending the conference.

Iury presenting his work at Filachange

Filipe presenting his work at Filachange

Few members of the Tandon Lab attended the workshop on “Prediction and Variability of Air-Sea Interactions: the South Asian Monsoon”  which was held at Institute for Computational & Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), Brown University, Providence. Prof Tandon was a co-organizer of that workshop while Sid Kerhalkar and Dr. Suraj Singh attended the workshop.

Members of the Tandon lab attended the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) 2022 on Ocean Mixing which was held at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts in June 2022. The goal of this conference was to bring together disparate groups to identify and describe critical elements of mixing physics that are most important in reducing the uncertainty in model predictions on all scales – spanning from rapid, small-scale dynamics to multi-decade, global impacts. This brought together observational, theoretical, experimental, and numerical communities which advanced our understanding of ocean mixing and further tackle applied problems that have most societal relevance.

Prof Tandon was a discussion leader for the session “Submesoscale and Finescale Processes: Fronts, Instabilities and Turbulence”, while Iury Simoes-Sousa, Filipe Pereira, Sid Kerhalkar and Dr. Suraj Singh presented their work in the form of poster presentations. Some of them also participated in the Gordon Research seminar, which was a platform for Early Career Scientists (ECR’s) to showcase their research. Attending this conference not only advanced the scientific knowledge of the lab members, but it also initiated discussions about mentoring through the power hour and peer-mentoring program of the GRC.

PS: We do not have pictures from the talks as the conference has a strict no-pictures policy.

Tandon Team were a part of the  champions cohort in the recently concluded NASA Openscapes program over the Spring 2022. This program is led remotely and is designed to ignite incremental and sustainable change within research groups — and beyond. Discussions focus around collaborative mindsets, norms, and software to enable open, reproducible, inclusive research, introducing tools like R, tidyverse, RMarkdown, GitHub, Google Drive, and Twitter and practices from open source communities. This year’s theme was also concentrated on using NASA Earthdata and transitioning workflows to the Cloud.

NASA Openscapes Champions Cohort 2022

Participating members include Profs Tandon and Buckingham, Suraj, Valentina, Iury, Filipe, Sid and Ersen’S.

Tandon lab had a strong presence in the 26^th annual Sigma Xi research exhibit held at Claire T. Carney Library, UMass Dartmouth in April 2022, with 6 members presenting and a second-place winner.

Iury presented his work on the atmospheric cold pools in the Bay of Bengal, Alan talked about the resonance in mooring lines due to vortex shedding, Ersen’s presented his REU project on Satellite imagery and Numerical modeling in the Bay of Bengal, Patrick demonstrating the in-house developed Aurelia profiler and Sid presented his results on Diurnal Warm Layers. Filipe showed his work from the baroclinically unstable meander in the South Atlantic and its ecological implications and was announced as the second best poster in the exhibit.

Filipe receiving his prize from Chancellor Fuller

Congratulations Filipe!

A paper by Caique Luko (an M.S student from University of São Paulo co-advised by Prof. Tandon)  titled  “Effects of the seasonality of mesoscale eddies on the planktonic dynamics off eastern Brazil” has been published in Dynamics of Atmosphere and Ocean with Prof. Tandon and Filipe Pereira (a PhD candidate from the USP-UMassD dual-degree program) as some of the co-authors of the paper. This study was aimed to understand if the seasonality of these mesoscale eddies affects the regional phytoplankton annual cycle. To achieve that, the authors analyzed chlorophyll-a satellite observations and performed two experiments using a Nutrients-Phytoplankton-Zooplankton (NPZ) model coupled to a 1 and a 1/2 -layer Quasi-Geostrophic model.

The results reveal that the phytoplankton annual cycle off eastern Brazil is mainly controlled by the seasonally varying advection of material offshore caused by the mesoscale eddies. Such mechanism may represent an important source of material to the tropical oligotrophic ocean. More on this study could be found here.

Congratulations Caique, Filipe and Prof Tandon!!

Horizontal distributions of the streamlines and the Chl-a obtained in: (1 st row) Satellite observations; (2 nd row) Experiment with no advection of enriched coastal material; and (3 rd row) Experiment with advection of enriched coastal material. Average scenarios of: (1 st column) summer; (2 nd column) fall; (3 rd column) winter and; (4 th column) spring. The concentration of chlorophyll-a is on a logarithmic scale. Dashed lines represent negative streamlines, and solid lines represent positive streamlines. The white shaded area masks regions shallower than 100 m.

Inter-campus Marine Science (IMS) program at University of Massachusetts organized their annual symposium at UMass Dartmouth in March 2022. This event marked the return of the in-person gathering at this symposium. Researchers from the five UMass campuses (Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell and Worcester) gather to discuss their work in marine sciences.

Iury Simoes-Sousa was invited to present a plenary talk on “Atmospheric cold pools in the Bay of Bengal”, while Adriano Giangiardi Filho, Filipe Pereira, Sid Kerhalkar, Patrick Pasteris and Ersen’S Joseph presented posters. Their posters can be found here . Sid was also one of the student organizers of the IMS symposium.

Iury presenting a plenary talk at IMS symposium 2022

Adriano won the best poster award in the Oceanography section. Congratulations Adriano!

Prof Amit Tandon and the rest of the lab had strong participation in the recently concluded Ocean Sciences Meeting-2022. Originally planned to be in Hawaii, the pandemic forced the organizers (AGU, ASLO, TOS) to make the event virtual. Spread across 7 days in February and March, it was definitely a good experience for the group to be a part of this event by presenting their published/on-going work as well as attending lots of other talks from a plethora of topics being discussed. Following are the details of the talks either given by the lab members or with Prof Tandon as a co-author.

1) Topographically-Generated Submesoscale Shear Instabilities associated with Brazil Current Meanders: Caique Luko

2) Diurnal Warm Layers in the Bay of Bengal during Monsoon 2019: Siddhant Kerhalkar

3) Atmospheric Cold Pools in the Bay of Bengal: Iury T.Simoes Sousa

4) Dynamics of a Baroclinically-unstable Meander and its Ecological Impacts: Filipe Pereira

5) Validation of a Hybrid Co-ordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific Oxygen Deficient Zone: Valentina Guinta

6) Next steps toward understanding Arabian Sea dynamics and ecology: Amit Tandon

7) Energy Exchange Between Internal Gravity Waves and Balanced Flow: Wave Action Conservation and a pathway to Dissipation:  Eric Kunze (with Amit Tandon)

8) Reabsorption of Lee-Wave Energy in Bottom-Intensified Currents: Yue Wu (with Amit Tandon)

9) Incorporating irreversible fluxes in K-e mixing model for Bay of Bengal: Shikha Singh (with Amit Tandon)

10) Characteristics and Variability of Air-sea fluxes in Bay of Bengal from OMNI Buoy Measurements: Jossia Joseph (with Amit Tandon)

11) Wave Induced Stokes Drift from a decade of Moored Buoy Observations in the Bay of Bengal: Kalyani M (with Amit Tandon).

Along with these 11 talks, Prof Tandon was also a session chair for the session “PL04- Indian Ocean circulation and its impact on air-sea interactions, biogeochemistry and ecology”.