Prof. Amit Tandon and PhD candidates, Iury Simoes-Sousa and Siddhant (Sid) Kerhalkar, recently participated in the CLIVAR workshop on Mesoscale and Frontal-scale air-sea interaction in Boulder, Colorado between March 06-08, 2023. The goal of this workshop was to make use of the progress in air-sea interaction to identify gaps in understanding, facilitating, and improving comparison of observations and modeling, and to build collaborations to respond to community needs. This workshop was funded by US CLIVAR, NASA, NSF, NOAA and DoE.

In addition to participating in discussions, Iury and Sid were presenting posters on their respective research. Iury presented a poster on “Atmospheric Cold Pools in the Bay of Bengal”  while Sid’s poster was titled “Observing and Modeling the variability of DWLs during the summer Monsoon in the Northern Indian Ocean“.  Prof. Tandon also volunteered to participate as a discussion leader while Iury and Sid volunteered as note-takers for discussions.

Sid and Prof. Tandon with Sid’s poster

Iury and Prof Tandon with Iury’s poster

Iury and Sid are grateful for the financial support by the workshop organizers (and sponsors) to attend this workshop while Sid was additionally funded by the Graduate Student Senate (GSS), UMassD travel support.

We are happy to announce the successful thesis defense of Alan Andonian, who recently completed his Master of Science (MS) degree in the Engineering and Applied Science program. This significant milestone marks the culmination of Alan’s research and academic journey.

Thesis Title: Vortex Shedding in Two-Dimensional Flow Around a Two-Cylinder Configuration

Alan presented an solid thesis defense, showcasing his understanding of the physics and engineering of vortex shedding in a multi-cylinder configuration, which has important implications for structural fatigue and acoustic interference in ocean moorings.

Thesis Defense Committee:

– Prof. Amit Tandon (Advisor / UMD)
– Prof. Banafsheh Seyedaghazadeh (UMD)
– Prof. Christian Buckingham (UMD)
– Prof. John Buck (UMD)

As Alan embarks on his new role as a Structural Simulations Test Engineer at Simulia Dassault Systems in Johnston, Rhode Island, we have no doubt that his skills and expertise will contribute to innovative advancements in the field.

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!

We are delighted to announce that iury (currently a Ph.D. candidate from our group) will join the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution this summer for the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics School. The theme for this year (Data-driven GFD) is a cutting-edge topic for both theory and oceanographic data analysis. If you want to know more about iury’s work, check out his website!