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!

Caique joined the group years ago as an MS student from the University of São Paulo (Prof. Silveira’s group). He investigated the effect of mesoscale eddies and topography generating submesoscale eddies in the Brazil Current’s domain. He successfully defended his thesis the last Friday (Apr 29th, 2022). Both prof. Tandon and prof. Buckingham was on his thesis committee. For his next steps, Caique is joining Scripps to pursue his Ph.D.

Ersen’S is featured on the university website! Do give it a read.

https://www.umassd.edu/engineering/features/ersens-joseph.html

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.