The climate system varies across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales in a complex and fascinating interplay between atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land. My research aims to better understand these interactions and to improve predictive capabilities that can provide valuable, early information for decision makers to ensure public safety, energy security, and protection of infrastructure.
Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) prediction is a global effort to forecast the state of the atmosphere and ocean with lead times between two weeks and a season. While it is recognized that the ocean directly influences atmospheric predictability on S2S timescales, my research focuses ocean predictability on such lead times.
Offshore wind resources play an increasingly important role as part of the transformation of the energy sector to renewable sources in a global effort to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change. My research addresses how the associated extraction of kinetic energy from the atmosphere affects air-sea fluxes that are critical for determining the momentum and heat balances in the regional ocean circulation.
Regional models are used to downscale large-scale information from global circulation models through physically consistent open boundary conditions. As part of my research, I have developed and used a variety of such high-resolution ocean models that allow for representation of processes on a wider range of spatial and temporal scales, including tides, and their interactions over a specific region of interest.