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  • Climate Change Resilience
  • Peer-reviewed publication
  • Carbon Markets

Climate Change Resilience

I collaborated with industry partners to develop a risk and resilience tool to help support business decisions related to decarbonization and proactive adaptation

It was amazing to have the opportunity to lead this project and work with some amazing colleagues and collaborators in the MCSC. See my blog post about how rewarding the interdisciplinary aspects of this project were, this article about the tool from the MCSC.

I analyzed flood risk and adaptation strategies

My team was a finalist in MIT’s 2018 Climate Changed competition, which challenged interdisciplinary teams to use models and recommend concrete solutions for flood resilience in the year 2050. My team and I used the output from a climate model, a regional weather model, a hydrological model, and a microeconomic cost-benefit framework to determine which solutions were both cost-effective and offered a sufficient degree of protection.

Carbon Markets

I organized and moderated a Q&A session with a panel of experts on Voluntary Carbon Markets

My colleague and I organized a Q&A session on Voluntary Carbon Markets where three experts discussed how to improve the current state of Voluntary Carbon Markets. I moderated the session, directing prearranged and audience-submitted questions towards the panelists, and dynamically engaged the attendees as they asked follow-up questions. Attendees ranged from those who are tasked with purchasing carbon offsets for large organizations to academics that research mechanisms to overcome some of the challenges inhibiting carbon markets from growing. A topic brief describing the event is available here.

Tropical Cyclones

Review of sea spray’s influence on tropical cyclone dynamics

Published in Journal of Physical Oceanography

Hurricanes are powered by extracting energy from the warm ocean, but at extreme wind speeds the air-sea transition region presents some unique challenges to scientists attempting to understand the relevant thermodynamics. There isn’t really an air-sea “interface” when the wind is moving at 50 m/s; there is sea spray, and foam, and bubbles, and all of that texture has implications for the rates of air-sea enthalpy and momentum exchange, which ultimately affects the rate at which the hurricane’s intensity changes. This paper synthesizes research about these challenges (>100 papers!), compares and contrasts experimental and numerical results from different studies, and summarizes the through-lines that are consistent throughout much of the literature. The peer-reviewed paper is available here.

Could sea spray power a hurricane?

Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans

Try this thought experiment from Kerry Emanuel. Imagine an elevation view of a hurricane, ocean on the bottom, hurricane on the top. Got it? Good, now imagine a plane parallel to the ocean’s surface centered on the hurricane’s eye. Ok, now if this plane is at the bottom of our imagined setup, then 100% of the plane’s surface area will be in water. If the plane is at the top, then 100% of the plane’s surface area will be in air. Now we move the plane towards the air-sea transition region. If we can find a level where the plane intersects regions of sea spray (water drops) and air in approximately equal proportions, then it stands to reason that any vertical energy flux needs to go through such a layer, and sea spray is going to play a substantial role in the energetics of a hurricane.

This is important because enthalpy transfer from tiny drops partially evaporating as they fly through the air at extreme speeds will occur at a higher rate than would be possible in calm conditions with a flat, well-defined interface all else being equal. In this paper, we suggest that for major hurricanes (approximately Category 3 and above) evaporation from sea spray is the dominant mechanism by which a hurricane intensifies and maintains its intensity. The peer-reviewed paper is available here.

Studying hurricanes at NASA

Published in Journal of Fluid Mechanics

My co-author and I analyzed high-resolution remote sensing observations from Hurricane Rita (2005) and found coherent, organized patterns of upscale energy transfer. It is not uncommon for numerical simulations of hurricanes to use turbulence closure schemes that preclude upscale energy transfer. Also it’s difficult to detect this phenomenon from observations unless the resolution is sufficiently high to resolve eddies that are on the order of 1 km. Our results have implications for boundary layer scheme selection in high-resolution numerical simulations of tropical cyclones. This project was a product of a NASA internship. The peer-reviewed paper is available here.

Air-sea exchange

Observations of coastal eddies vs ERA5

Published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society

Remote sensed and in situ observations of persistent ocean eddies have suggested that there is a rectified effect from the presence of alternating warm and cold ocean eddies where more energy is injected into storm tracks because of this pattern than would be if there was a uniform ocean surface at the average temperature of the two eddies. We searched for this effect in ERA5 reanalysis data and found that the sea surface temperature in ERA5 does not have large enough temperature variations to result in a significant signal.

One cool thing I want to tease here is how we removed the mesoscale eddies from the ERA5 data. In numerical simulations where people look for this effect, they normally run companion simulations with and without eddies. Well, we needed to do that, but we had reanalysis data where all the scales were mixed together…in 2D. So we made an eddy filter with a 2D FFT, and it worked great! If you think that you might be in the market for such a filter, the peer-reviewed paper is available here.