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Event Details:
Please join us Thursday, February 23, 2023, for our Winter Seminar Series with our guest speaker: Monica Wilhelmus.
EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE
SEMINAR SERIES
12:00-1:20pm
Mccullough Building Room 115
Monica Wilhelmus, Assistant Professor
School of Engineering at Brown University
"Tracing the New Arctic"
Turbulence remains one of the major unresolved problems in classical mechanics and an intrinsic feature of the Earth system. In the Arctic Ocean, eddies with small-to-moderate length scales (1 to 100 km) play a critical role in transferring heat, momentum, and fluid properties while acting as a forcing source for drifting ice plates (or floes). However, the lack of high-resolution altimeter measurements and the inherent challenges of obtaining comprehensive in-situ measurements have limited our ability to analyze physical processes along with sea ice-ocean interactions in detail. In this talk, I will present new advances by my group for the automatic identification and tracking of ice floes in optical satellite imagery providing a unique record of ice floe shapes, trajectories, and velocities (including rotational characteristics). The novelty of our framework is that the resulting observations not only allow us to examine the dynamical structure of the sea ice field, but also describe how free-drifting floes can be used as a proxy to infer ocean eddy dynamics within the small-to-moderate scale range. I will present case studies in the Beaufort Gyre and Fram Strait, along with an overview of recently awarded projects to develop a new-generation sea ice product, providing a road map to understanding the dynamics of critical momentum and heat transfer processes in the Arctic Ocean.
Biography:
Dr. Monica Martinez Wilhelmus is an assistant professor in the School of Engineering at Brown University. She received her undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 2010 and her M.S. (2012) and Ph.D. (2016) degrees, both in Mechanical Engineering, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2016, she held a postdoctoral scholar position to work on a collaborative project between the Ocean Science group at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) and the Environmental Science and Engineering department at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Before joining Brown, she was an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and an affiliated scientist at NASA JPL. Her research combines experimental techniques and algorithm development to understand transport phenomena within the intersection of biology, oceanography, and fluid mechanics.
Website:
https://engineering.brown.edu/people/monica-martinez-wilhelmus