Seminar – Ocean fronts, eddies, and internal waves in numerical models and SWOT

Amadeo Scott

Dr. Dimitris Menemenlis | Moss Landing Marine Labs, SJSURF

Presenting: "Ocean fronts, eddies, and internal waves in numerical models and SWOT"

Hosted by: Physical Oceanography Lab

MLML Seminar | September 23rd, 2025 at 4pm (PDT)

Watch the Live Stream here or here

Ocean fronts, eddies, and internal waves in numerical models and SWOT

The ocean is the climate's largest reservoir of heat, freshwater, and carbon. Therefore, in order to understand and predict the impact of natural and anthropogenic perturbations on the climate system, we need to understand and predict the exchange of heat, freshwater, carbon, and other properties between the global ocean and the atmosphere. The driving hypothesis of my talk is that submesoscale ocean motions (<50 km), both balanced and unbalanced, play a key role in air-sea exchanges and vertical property transports in the ocean. To evaluate this hypothesis, we can use a set of tools that have become available during the past decade, namely (1) submesoscale and internal-wave admitting global-ocean simulations and (2) observations obtained by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, which recently completed the second of its 3-year science orbit. I will describe some completed and ongoing studies that are using the aforementioned tools to study the impact of submesoscales on ocean circulation and climate.

Dr. Dimitris Menemenlis

Dr. Dimitris Menemenlis is the most recent hire of the MLML Ocean Modeling Lab. He first fell in love with programming while playing with an HP-25C as a teenager growing up in Montreal. Although an acoustical oceanographer by training, by sharing an office at MIT with Chris Hill and Stephanie Dutkiewicz during his PostDoc years, he became one of the early adopters of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model (MITgcm), a key contributor to the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) project, and always a very big fan of the MIT Darwin Project. He is joining Drs. Carroll and Savelli at MLML in order to help take the open-source, data-constrained ECCO-Darwin global-ocean general circulation and biogeochemistry model to the next level!