The Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering
Distinguished Lecture Series

Presents

Professor Harindra Joseph Fernando
University of Notre Dame 

Monsoon Intraseasonal Oscillations in Equatorial Atmosphere and Oceans

Areas of interest: Geophysical and Environmental Fluid Dynamics

Thursday, October 21 at 1 p.m.ET 

REGISTER HERE.
(an email with Zoom link will be sent via email the morning of the event)

Harindra Fernando for endowed chairs..Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

H.J.S. Fernando
Departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences and
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
University of Notre Dame

The hydrology of Indian Summer Monsoons is sensitively determined by the active and break phases of rainfall. Such variability is related to a bevy of intraseasonal oscillations (ISO) present in the tropical atmosphere and oceans with time scales ranging from about 30 to 60 days. Some examples of ISO are the ubiquitous equatorial planetary waves and the Madden Julian Oscillation that travel along an equatorial wave guide.

Another important but meagerly understood ISO is the Monsoon Intraseasonal Oscillations (MISO) that propagate from the equatorial Indian Ocean toward the Bay of Bengal and then split into westward and northward branches. MISO events are directly related to the rainfall variability as well as a source of ISO with global reach that trigger larger scale phenomena, for example, El Niño.

A comprehensive research program sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research (2012-2022) is afoot to peer into both oceanic and atmospheric ISO in the northern Indian Ocean. Under the umbrella of this initiative are the ASIRI, ASIRI-RAWI, NasCAR and MISO-BOB initiatives.

Hypotheses are advanced on the dynamics of MISO propagation as well as convective-coupling of atmospheric and oceanic ISO across the air-sea interface. Two-month long ocean cruises were conducted in 2013, 2014, and 2015 concentrating on oceanic ISOs, complemented by deep ocean moorings and land based observations covering four southeast Asian countries.

A Pilot experiment in the summer 2018 was exclusively focused on MISO events, and included observations aboard a research vessel and an instrumented aircraft. These in situ observations were complemented by satellite and reanalysis products to obtain a holistic picture of MISO dynamics. In unison, the research programs sheds light on the dynamics of MISO as well as processes that undergird convective coupling of MISO with the ocean below.

The ocean was found to exert great control on MISO via complex multiscale air-sea interaction processes. Observations and modeling conducted during these programs will be outlined in this presentation, paying attention to intriguing phenomena and interactions across the scales that provide building blocks of weather variability in equatorial oceans and atmosphere.

Biographical Sketch of Harindra Joseph Fernando
Joseph Fernando is currently the Wayne and Diana Murdy Endowed Professor of Engineering and Geosciences at University of Notre Dame.
He received his education at the University of Sri Lanka, the Johns Hopkins University and was a post-doctoral fellow at California Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Physical Society, American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He was elected to the European Academy in 2009. He received docteur honoris causa form University of Grenoble, France, in 2014 and Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa from University of Dundee, Scotland in 2016.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environmental Fluid Dynamics and an Editor of the journals Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics and Journal of Non-Linear Processes in Geophysics and an Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the Royal Society (London).
He has published more than 350 papers spanning some sixty international archival Journals, covering basic fluid dynamics, experimental methods, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, environmental sciences and engineering, air pollution, alternative energy sources, acoustics, heat transfer and hydraulics and fluids engineering.  He was a Principal Investigator of many international field experiments, including MATERHORN, PERDIGAO, CASPER, ASIRI, ASIRI-RAWI, MISO-BOB, IFFExO and C-FOG.