From little things big things grow: how small-scale ocean turbulence affects the global ocean circulation and climate

by Dr Navid Constantinou (University of Melbourne (AU))

Friday 17 May 2024, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Athens

B228 (ΘΕΕ02)

Abstract:  The underlying thread in my research is to discover how small-scale, turbulent flow features affect the bigger picture: the global ocean circulation and climate. Oceanic mesoscale eddies transport heat, carbon, and nutrients and thereby, despite their small size, regulate the global climate. Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly wrote “from little things big things grow”; his words resonate in this exploration. I will discuss how mesoscale ocean eddies affect the variability of the upper-ocean heat content at global scales and at decadal time scales and how the effect of ocean eddies can feed back on the atmosphere and climate. I will show that climate models that parametrise rather than resolve ocean mesoscale eddies show significant biases in these decadal patterns of upper-ocean heat content, arguing for the need to resolve the ocean’s mesoscale in climate projections. I will further discuss my philosophy on the symbiotic nature between climate science and software. I will showcase a new ocean model we’ve been developing that harnesses the power of graphical processing units (GPUs) and achieves speedups of 40x-50x compared to state-of-the-art ocean models that run on CPUs. Such speedups open a multitude of possibilities, amongst which, the possibility to of perform climate projections at resolutions that resolve the ocean eddies.

About the speaker: Navid grew up in Lefkosia and studied physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (BSc, MSc, PhD). After obtaining his PhD in 2015, he was awarded a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral fellowship to work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. At 2018, Navid moved down under at the Australian National University first as a Research Fellow (2018-2021) and then as an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow (2021-2024). On June 2024 he’s starting as a Senior Lecturer at the School of Geography Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Navid studies turbulent flows. His research focuses on how the ocean’s small-scale turbulent motions affect the large-scale ocean circulation and the Earth’s climate. In parallel, he is very passionate about scientific computing and climate model development. Navid is one of the core-developers of the ocean dynamical core of the new Earth System Model developed by the Climate Modelling Alliance (https://clima.caltech.edu/). He is also very passionate about open-source software and reproducibility practices. His favourite planet other than ours is Jupiter. Besides research and coding, he enjoys surfing, biking, horse riding, and dancing. Watch him introducing himself in 60 seconds at https://vimeo.com/740918473. For more you can browse his website at www.navidconstantinou.com