Jean Lynch-Stieglitz
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Earth & Environmental Science
Winds over the tropical oceans decide where warm and cold surface water collects, and that pattern shapes weather and climate around the globe. Inside the ocean, waves and turbulent mixing move heat and water, but the global ocean models used for forecasting struggle to capture them.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
paleoceanography
paleoclimate
Last Glacial Maximum
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test how changes in tropical winds alter thermocline depth across the Indo-Pacific by running sensitivity experiments in a high-resolution ocean model.
- Extend a database of oxygen isotope measurements from subsurface planktonic foraminifera shells to the tropical Indian Ocean, covering both modern and Last Glacial Maximum sediments.
- Infer Last Glacial Maximum tropical wind fields by inverting foraminiferal proxy data with the model-derived link between winds and thermocline structure.
- Measure flow distortion near rough topography, internal wave breaking, and momentum and buoyancy fluxes using a moored array of instruments in the Brazil Basin, South Atlantic.
- Compare a statistical description of the regional internal wavefield, built from tracer release and Global Drifter Program data, against five models from HYCOM to large eddy simulations.
More about the research
Both projects ask how ocean circulation works at scales that matter for climate. One reads the record of the last ice age. The other studies present-day mixing in the deep South Atlantic.
Why it matters
Better estimates of how tropical winds and the warm-water layer responded to ice-age conditions could improve understanding of how tropical climate, which steers global weather, may respond to rising greenhouse gases. Testing ocean models against field measurements of internal waves and mixing could help modelers make global circulation and forecast models more reliable. The ice-age reconstructions will also produce shared data that other climate researchers can use.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Patrick Rafter
University of South Florida, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether Indian Ocean bottom water was unusually old during the last ice age by comparing the radiocarbon ages of fossil shells with sediment ages in four new cores from across the basin.
James Moum
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether tropical instability waves in the equatorial Pacific radiate internal waves downward and reshape the internal wave field, using moorings, a fastCTD, the Epsilometer turbulence profiler and WireWalker drifting profilers.
Jessica Conroy
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Earth & Environmental Science
Map an oxygen isotope "isoscape" of the modern tropical Pacific from long-running seawater and precipitation collection sites, showing how seawater and rainfall isotope values shift between El Niño and La Niña phases.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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