Visualizing Earth Science Data

How would you explain the large scale pattern of weather fronts to a general audience? Roman Kowch, an undergraduate major in EAPS, has been exploring one way; as part of a UROP project with Lodovica Illari, Chris Hill and Constantinos Evangelinos.

Prompted by the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Ross Tulloch, Chris Hill and Oliver Jahn have been using MITgcm to compute the vulnerability of individual locations to remote buoyant surface plumes.

As we did last year we have collected a sample of 2010 research articles that involved MITgcm in some way. Take a look…

This month we look at work by Nicolas Grisouard and Chantal Staquet of the Laboratoire des Ecoulements Geophysiques et Industriels, Grenoble, France, who have been using MITgcm to model internal solitary waves (ISWs) of a kind observed in the Bay of Biscay.

What is it about MITgcm that it spawns so many great movies? In a break with science stories, MITgcm shares 3 recent movies showcasing projects using MITgcm.

In a first for models simulating the 3d dynamics of both ocean and atmosphere, the MITgcm climate model has been found to exhibit three different stable states for exactly the same set of parameters and external forcings, suggesting that climates may exhibit multiple equilibria even in the presence of a vigorous internal variability sustained by weather systems and ocean-atmosphere-sea ice interactions…

This month we look at work by Tom Haine, Professor of Physical Oceanography at Johns Hopkins University who is using MITgcm to model high-frequency fluctuations in the flow through the Denmark Strait…

This month we look at work by Yohai Kaspi (a NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellow currently working with Tapio Schneider at Caltech) who has been using MITgcm to model the atmosphere on a Jupiter-like gas giant…

This month we look at work by Martha Buckley, David Ferreira, Jean-Michel Campin, Ross Tulloch and John Marshall, who have been using MITgcm to explore what role ocean circulation may play in Atlantic decadal variability. Asking the question: What is the role of the ocean circulation in Atlantic decadal SST variability, Buckley and co-workers use MITgcm to analyse the behavior of thermal anomalies within the framework of an idealised GCM.

Brian Dushaw has been looking at the MITgcm ECCO2 state-estimates with help from Dimitris Menemenlis. Brian finds that by using the hydrography from the state-estimate, together with some enhanced resolution bathymetric data in key regions, he can reconstruct acoustic paths between Perth and Bermuda that were first measured in the 1960s. Previous ray-tracing efforts to reproduce this observed pathway computationally have not succeeded ….