Maria Capo Truyols
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
The ocean is layered: warm, sunlit surface water sits on top of cold, deep water, and the two mix only slowly. Small, fast currents called submesoscale currents can break through these layers.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
submesoscale currents
vertical velocity
ocean fronts
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Map the spatial structure and time evolution of submesoscale currents, small ocean currents lasting hours to days, in the Alboran Sea using realistic nested numerical simulations at increasing resolution.
- Test whether the strongest vertical velocities in the Alboran Sea occur at surface fronts, the boundaries between different water masses, using high-resolution simulations combined with simplified process models.
- Determine how currents flowing over seafloor obstacles drive vertical motion that links the bottom layer with the ocean interior, using realistic and idealized simulations.
- Track how water moves between the surface, the interior and the bottom using Lagrangian methods, which follow individual water parcels through the simulated flow.
More about the research
They span hundreds to thousands of meters across, tens to hundreds of meters deep, and change over hours to days. These currents move water, nutrients and other materials up and down between the surface, the deep interior and the seafloor. That vertical movement shapes how the ocean's chemistry and biology vary. Because the currents are small and short-lived, they are hard to observe and are still poorly understood.
Why it matters
Vertical currents carry heat, nutrients and other dissolved materials between the ocean surface, its interior and the seafloor. A clearer picture of what triggers these currents in the Mediterranean could improve how ocean models represent the transport of materials. Those models feed into studies of ocean biology and chemistry, such as where nutrients reach sunlit waters.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tomas Chor
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Examine how symmetric instabilities, an overturning motion that grows at ocean fronts, modify the forward cascade of energy toward smaller scales at submesoscale fronts in the presence of mesoscale strain.
Leif Thomas
Stanford University, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop theory for how vertically sheared near-bottom currents change the dispersion relation of internal waves in a sloping bottom boundary layer, for conditions where the Rossby and Richardson numbers are near one.
John Wilkin
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure water mass and transport variability at the same time in the inflow and outflow straits of the Indonesian Throughflow, using a 3-year mooring array run jointly with China and Indonesia.
The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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