FALL 2025
Fridays at 11:00 am, Rosenstiel School Auditorium / Virtual Auditorium
Aug 22: NO SEMINAR
Aug 29: NO SEMINAR
Sep 05: NO SEMINAR
Sep 12: NO SEMINAR
Sep 19: SPECIAL ATM & OCE FACULTY PRESENTATION SERIES
Dr. Igor Kamenkovich
Department of Ocean Sciences, Rosenstiel School
Beyond Diffusion: Capturing the Complexity of Mesoscale Eddy Transport
Recording Available at COMPASS ON DEMAND
Mesoscale eddies – ocean currents spanning tens to hundreds of kilometers – play a key role in transporting tracers across the world's oceans, shaping the large-scale distributions of temperature, salinity, and other properties. Yet most climate models cannot resolve these eddies, relying instead on parameterizations that reduce their impact to turbulent diffusion along tracer gradients. However, evidence from numerical simulations reveals that eddy-driven mixing is far more complex, with diagnosed turbulent diffusion varying by location, time, and direction. Moreover, eddies frequently sharpen tracer fronts and can produce up-gradient fluxes that defy traditional diffusive models. This work introduces a novel framework, blending generalized eddy-induced advection with isopycnal diffusion, to more accurately represent eddy effects on tracers. By capturing eddy-driven filamentation and the sharpening of oceanic fronts, this approach offers a path to more physically consistent parameterizations for coarse-resolution ocean models. Ultimately, these results suggest the need to move beyond purely diffusive approaches and toward methods that can truly capture the complexity of eddy transport, improving the representation of key eddy effects in climate simulations.
Sep 26: Dr. Ved Chirayath
Department of Ocean Sciences, Rosenstiel School
Updates From Your Neighborhood Aircraft Center for Earth Studies (ACES)
In this talk, I share several updates and research advances from the Aircraft Center for Earth Studies, introduce our new long endurance electric aircraft and research vessels, new NASA-funded drone center, courses, and highlights from recent expeditions and technology developments. ACES research focuses on inventing and developing next-generation in-situ and remote sensing technologies, airborne and spaceborne instruments, and artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand and protect our natural world, principally using space exploration technologies. Ultimately, my investigations aim to extend our capabilities for studying and protecting life on Earth as well as aiding in the search for life elsewhere in the universe. I seek to advance knowledge about the Earth system at planetary scales and inform analog research for planetary science at large. I extensively use Earth's Ocean, our largest biosphere, and extreme environments as analogs for planetary and space exploration. In a 2024 TEDx talk, I articulated my vision to map the world's oceans using NASA space exploration technologies I invented for an oceanography moonshot and pave the way for exploration of ocean worlds across the solar system. Most recently, as a Moore Inventor Fellow, I am inventing an advanced remote sensing technology that can see even deeper underwater, and was awarded a NASA Instrument Incubator Program grant to build a fluorescent LiDAR, FLOR-A, for airborne and spaceborne detection of biogenic markers and anthropogenic marine debris and plastics.
This talk will feature additional selected research highlights including our:
1) DoD SERDP project, Automated Airborne Detection of Underwater Munitions using NASA Multispectral Passive & Active MiDAR Fluid Lensing, which used Rosenstiel's Broad Key research station for the automated airborne detection and localization of underwater military munitions in a complex marine environment.
2) Automated Motile Marine Wildlife Detection in Coral Reefs using NASA Airborne Fluid Lensing, where we developed a new airborne fluid lensing-based marine wildlife detection algorithm to characterize moving underwater wildlife using raw fluid lensing data and solutions. The detector assesses marine animals by analyzing time series imagery, deriving and characterizing animal planform area, velocity, and abundance for keystone reef species across depths of ~0-20m, at the cm-scale, in complex coral reef ecosystems over dozens of square kilometers.
3) 2025 Antarctic Expedition Highlights, where several novel technology demonstrations were successfully executed to collect raw data for airborne fluid lensing and contemporaneous passive thermal infrared imaging of cetaceans, as well as demonstration of the airborne NASA MiDAR instrument in a suitable planetary analog environment.
4) NASA MarineVERSE Global Coral Reef Habitat Mapping Project that uses airborne fluid lensing and NeMO-Net, a crowd-sourced citizen science video game, to map and monitor change in reef ecosystems.
Additionally, highlights from my new course, MSC 332 – Planetary Science, the Search for Life, & Oceans across the Solar System, a research-experiential semester course that gives students first-hand lab experience with state-of-the-art NASA instruments, participating in field trips on an electric research vessel, telescope time for planetary observations, ocean biology labs, and physics and optics labs.
Oct 03: NO SEMINAR
Oct 10: Dr. Claudia Benitez-Nelson
School of the Earth, Ocean & Environment, University of South Carolina, Columbia
Invited Speaker of the Department of Ocean Sciences
Understanding Sinking Particle Flux and Composition in Coastal Marine Systems
Sinking particles play a critical role in the ocean by transporting material from the surface ocean to depth. The magnitude and composition of this downward flux influence a suite of processes, ranging from carbon storage and contaminant removal to microbial diversity and benthic foodwebs. Particle flux remains poorly understood, in part due to the stochastic nature of flux events and the multitude of abiotic and biogeochemical reactions that drive particle composition. This seminar will dive into our current understanding of particle export, focusing on connecting surface water measurements with those in underlying sediments. Time-series sediment trap deployments in the Cariaco and Santa Barbara Basins (and others) will be used as case studies.
Oct 17: NO SEMINAR
Oct 24: Dr. Rodrigo Duran
Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona (residing in Stuart, Florida)
Guest of Josefina Olascoaga, Department of Ocean Sciences
On the Physical Mechanisms Controlling Loop Current Eddy Separations
and Their Seasonality
Recording Available at COMPASS ON DEMAND
The Loop Current (LC) and its eddy-shedding dynamics profoundly impact the Gulf of Mexico, influencing hurricane intensity, offshore platform safety, algal blooms, and the fishing industry. However, the driving mechanisms behind the well-documented seasonality of eddy-shedding events have remained a long-standing open question. This study resolves that question by shifting from a descriptive kinematic view to a causal energetic framework. This breakthrough is achieved through the combination of three complementary methodologies: canonical energy transfers to reproducibly quantify key instabilities, information-flow theory to independently confirm causality, and vorticity transport barriers from nonlinear dynamical systems theory to explain the permanent separation mechanism. Using 30 years of altimetry data and a 22-year reanalysis, we trace a direct causal chain: The summer seasonal maximum in mean kinetic energy of the Yucatan Current drives intense cyclonic vorticity production via barotropic instability. This vorticity leads to LC frontal eddies that cut through the LC, and the formation of a vorticity transport barrier causing the separation to become final as it dynamically severs the new eddy from the main current. The rarity of December shedding events arises from the combined effects of reduced vorticity production and strong wind-driven damping of eddies. This framework reveals that the separation mechanism exists year-round, with seasonality emerging from the modulation of energy pathways, providing a theoretical foundation for LC dynamics and a physical basis for predicting critical events related to tropical cyclone intensification and offshore platform safety.
Oct 31: NO SEMINAR (Rosenstiel School faculty meeting)
Nov 07: STUDENT SEMINARS
Cameron Pine (ATM)
Victoria Pizzini (ATM)
Nov 14: STUDENT SEMINARS
Caitlin Martinez (ATM)
Christina Schuler (ATM)
Shanna Chamhitt (ATM)
Nov 21: Samantha Medina
Department of Ocean Sciences, Rosenstiel School
(one-hour OCE student seminar)
Nov 28: NO SEMINAR (Thanksgiving Recess)
Dec 05: SPECIAL ATM & OCE FACULTY PRESENTATION SERIES
Dr. Roland Romeiser
Department of Ocean Sciences, Rosenstiel School
SPRING 2026 PREVIEW
Mar 06: Dr. Jane Baldwin
Atmospheric Integrated Research, University of California Irvine
Guest of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Mar 20: NO SEMINAR (Rosenstiel School Research Day)
