For this academic year, the mechanical engineering (MNE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department joined their capstone programs. The capstone program brings together the technical and interpersonal skills needed for a student, in a team environment, to successfully plan, complete, and deliver a significant engineering project to a real customer. The culmination of this was the ECE and MNE Joint Senior Design Presentation Day held on May 1, 2025.

Team Aurelia, advised by Prof. Amit Tandon and Patrick Pasteris, and comprised of undergraduate students Ben Claxton, Eli Kroll, Shane Mercuri, and Jacob Tavares, with team lead James Bonnell bagged third place at the event. Their project involved improving the existing drive system on the Aurelia Upper Ocean Profiler – improving the depth capability and increasing operational life. They worked on testing out different motors for their power consumption and on designing a parking brake to install the profiler at depth without requiring active power. They also designed a variable gearbox to improve torque from the piston and increase the depth capability of the profiler.

Congratulations on this achievement to everyone involved!

[Left to Right – Eli Kroll (ECE), Jacob Tavares (ECE), James Bonnel (MNE; team lead), Shane Mercuri (MNE), and Ben Claxton(MNE)] standing next to their poster

On the day of the 3MT thesis competition finale (April 10, 2025), Prof. Tandon was awarded with the ‘2025 Outstanding Graduate Faculty Research Mentor‘ prize for his commitment to working with graduate students in research, knowledge creation and scholarship.

Colleagues and students gathered on the university’s main campus to honor his contributions to academia.

Congratulations Dr. Tandon!

(From Left) Dr. Ramana Patibandla, Debarshi Sarkar, Dr. Yanlai Chen, Dr. Amit Tandon, Siddhant Kerhalkar, Dr. Agata Piffer-Braga & Parth Sastry

Parth Sastry and Debarshi Sarkar recently participated in the 3 MT thesis competition held in Grand Reading Room at UMass Dartmouth. Organized by Office of the Associate Provost for Graduate Studies, Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) is a research communication competition which challenges graduate research students (PhD and Masters by Research) to present a compelling oration on their thesis topic and its significance in just three minutes.  The competition develops academic, presentation, and research communication skills and supports the development of research students’ capacity to effectively explain their research in language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

Parth talked about his work on simulations of eddies in the eastern tropical Pacific and how they impact oxygen transport. Debarshi talked his research on biases in reanalysis products, their importance and how they affect the summer monsoon over the Indian subcontinent. It was an educational and a challenging experience for them to condense their research into an easily digestible, short, three-minute segment.

Debarshi presenting his poster.

Parth presenting his poster.

A new paper led by Dr. Ashish Soni from IITM Pune with Dr. Tandon as a co-author highlights groundbreaking research on black carbon aerosols. This study, conducted in the Arabian Sea after the passage of cyclone Biparjoy collaboratively by Indian and USA scientific teams in the EKAMSAT science fieldwork conducted onboard R/V Roger Revelle in 2023, reveals that deep waters are a significant source of these black carbon aerosols. 

Congratulations Dr. Tandon!

More about the paper: Here

On March 26, 2025, the Inter-campus Marine Science (IMS) of University of Massachusetts (UMass) hosted the annual symposium at the School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST). The event brought together students and faculties from various UMass campuses to showcase their latest findings and innovations in marine science, in forms of posters, lightning talks and plenary talks.

This year, all the members of the Tandon lab participated in the symposium. PhD student Parth Sastry presented a lightning talk and a poster on his work in idealized anticyclonic eddy simulations with applications to the eastern tropical Pacific. The poster was awarded a second runner-up position in the event. Congratulations Parth!

PhD student Debarshi Sarkar, presented his work as a poster and lightning talk on air-sea heat flux biases in reanalysis products during the months of spring in the Arabian Sea. Apart from participating in the symposium, Debarshi was also a member of the organizing committee which made the symposium possible. PhD students Siddhant Kerhalkar presented a poster on his work in tropical cyclone (TC) Biparjoy’s wake recovery. This article was published in Geophysical Research Letter recently (here). Postdoc Dr. Ramana Patibandla also presented a poster on his work in near inertial wave propagation in curved fronts.

Note: All the posters are available online (Posters – 2025 IMS Research Symposium).

Parth Sastry with his poster at IMS-Symposium 2025

Debarshi Sarkar with his poster at IMS-Symposium 2025

Dr. Ramana Patibandla with his poster at IMS-Symposium 2025

Siddhant Kerhalkar with his poster at IMS-Symposium 2025

Dr. Amit Tandon and Tandon Lab members Debarshi, Siddhant, and Ramana attended the EKAMSAT (Enhancing Knowledge of the Arabian Sea Marine Environment through Science and Advanced Technology) update meeting held on March 6–7, 2025. The meeting was hosted by Dr. Aneesh Subramaniam at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This two-day intensive meeting included a series of back-to-back sessions, where researchers from various collaborating universities and institutes shared updates on their work. These talks helped everyone stay on the same page and move closer to the goals of the EKAMSAT program.

Siddhant presented a 10-minute talk titled “Impacts of Salinity Stratification on SST in the Northern Indian Ocean Warm Pool” and Debarshi presented two 10-minute talks on air-sea heat flux biases in reanalysis products and the submesoscale variabilities in air-sea flux parameters during the time of monsoon transition.

Siddhant Kerhalkar presenting his talk.

Debarshi presenting one of his talks.

The meeting concluded with participants dividing into groups based on shared research interests. Each group worked on summarizing the main scientific findings from the talks and discussions and identifying key questions that still need to be addressed.

A new study led by Tandon lab PhD student Siddhant (Sid) Kerhalkar sheds light on the recovery of ocean thermal structures after cyclone passage, a largely unexplored area due to limited direct observations. As part of an international research effort in the Arabian Sea, Sid and his co-authors (including Dr Tandon) analyzed data from the R/V Thompson’s 2023 field campaign to study the aftermath of Cyclone Biparjoy. Their findings reveal that the cyclone’s slow movement, combined with monsoon winds, triggered small-scale oceanic processes that created asymmetrical temperature, salinity, and velocity structures in its wake—marking first such measurements in the region.

These observations were part of the “Enhancing Knowledge of the Arabian Sea Marine Environment through Science and Advanced Training (EKAMSAT)” program, an international collaboration funded by India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The initiative aims to improve monsoon prediction models by gathering critical oceanographic and atmospheric data in the Arabian Sea, a region that has been anomalously warm in recent years but remains less studied than many of the world’s oceans.

“Our research shows that these submesoscale processes, play a critical role in accelerating the recovery of the ocean’s thermal structure after a cyclone”, said Sid. “This has major implications for ocean heat transport, nutrient distribution, and weather predictability, particularly for monsoon forecasts”.

The study highlights how oceanic processes influence air-sea heat exchange and climate dynamics, providing valuable insights for improving storm behavior and monsoon predictions, which are crucial for climate forecasting and disaster preparedness affecting nearly a third of the world’s population.

“Siddhant’s research provides new observational evidence that will help refine predictive models for extreme weather events”, said Dr. Tandon.

The paper, titled “Monsoon-Frontal Interactions Drive Cyclone Biparjoy’s Wake Recovery in the Arabian Sea” is published in Geophysical Research Letters and is available at [here].

Fig: Schematic explaining the forcing conditions and the asymmetric response of the cold wake

Congratulations Sid and Dr Tandon!

A recent study led by former post-doctoral fellow Dr. Suraj Singh, in collaboration with Dr. Amit Tandon and former research professor Dr. Christian E. Buckingham, titled ‘On baroclinic instability of curved fronts’, explores how introducing slight curvature to oceanic fronts impacts baroclinic instabilities.
The research extends the classic Eady and Charney models on a cylindrical polar coordinate system by adding a slight curvature to a predominantly zonal flow. Under quasi-geostrophic scaling, the team analyzed the structure and growth rates of the pressure perturbations.
A key finding reveals that while unstable Eady modes remain largely unaffected by curvature, unstable Charney modes deepen owing to the introduction of a depth scale, enhancing vertical buoyancy flux—a phenomenon highlighted in their results (figure below).
The study also acknowledges certain limitations and suggests that understanding curved fronts could improve future parametrization of baroclinic instabilities in ocean models, and eddies which are deeper than the mixed layers. (here)

Fig: Vertical structure of the along-front averaged buoyancy flux for several values of the radius of curvature (Fig 8 of the paper)

In September 2024, Dr. Amit Tandon was felicitated with the title of Commonwealth Professor (here) at UMass Dartmouth, an achievement celebrated on November 4th, 2024, during the Faculty Recognition Ceremony.

Colleagues, students and family gathered on the university’s main campus to honor his contributions to academia.

Congratulations, Dr. Tandon, on this well-earned recognition!

Teledyne Marine, a global leader in developing deep ocean floats, recently highlighted the remarkable work of Dr. Amit Tandon and graduate student Patrick Pasteris in their recent feature.

They worked with four undergraduate engineering students for their capstone projects, with the help from the chief engineer from Teledyne Marine Bob Melvin and capstone instructor Prof. Hamed Samandari. The main objective of the project was to improve the design of the buoyancy engine and make the previous product more energy efficient. The students researched a combination of many components like pumps, motors, bladders, battery chemistries, in different ocean conditions to make the floats “Go-Anywhere”.

“…The students were motivated and talented, working well as a team to engineer and test a concept…I look forward to more capstone opportunities”, said Teledyne chief engineer Bob Melvin.

More information in the article: here and on YouTube: here