I am a 4th year graduate student at the department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA. The research I am doing is in the fields of Physical Oceanography and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, and has involved both modeling and observations. My PhD advisors are Professors Andrew Stewart and Jim McWilliams. I have also learned a lot from working with Dr. Jeroen Molemaker in the Marine Operations program.

My main research project (with Professors Andrew Stewart and Jim McWilliams) has to do with the "leakiness" (Bower et al 2009) of the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC). This boundary current (an important component of the large scale circulation of the Ocean), has been observed to become less coherent and lose material ("leak") to the interior of the ocean near a series of underwater topographical features (e.g., the Grand Banks of Newfoundland) in the North Atlantic. Although a few hypothesis have been suggested for the mechanism of leakiness, no definitive study has resolved this question. At the first stage of my PhD research, we have investigated a candidate instability mechanism in an idealized setting (Solodoch, Stewart and McWilliams 2016), namely the modulation of baroclinic instability (loss of gravitational potential energy due to untilting of density surfaces) by the horizontal curvature of the underwater topography. The investigation included both analytic and numerical work.

In the second stage of the DWBC leakiness project, we set up and ran a high-resolution numerical model (ROMS) of the North Atlantic area of interest to study the problem in (almost) its full complexity.  The design and set up of the "run" was a technical stage not without hurdles. After much work (and computer hours) we had 16 years of simulated Ocean Years worth of data, and many TBs. Then the analysis begins. While the complex model allows the potential testing and discovery of many more dynamic mechanisms, the analysis is also made much more difficult and tricky at times due to this complexity, relative to an idealized model.  I presented preliminary results from this phase at the 2017 AOFD conference and at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting, and we are now working on a manuscript. More on this soon. I find that the experience of both idealized and highly complex modeling and numerical work has been synergistic in terms of the skills it develops, and in terms of the results which we could obtain in the investigation. To test the validity of the model, and as an additional tool of discovery, we have also been investigating large observational data-sets taken by the Physical Oceanography community over a few decades in the area, such as Argo and RAFOS floats.

In addition to the modeling work I have also been involved in the last few years with the UCLA Marine Operations (Mops) program: https://dept.atmos.ucla.edu/marineops/home, where coastal observations from a 28-foot Zodiac armed to the teeth with scientific instruments are routinely made.  The Mops program focuses on submesoscale Physical Oceanography, where "small" scale (about 0.1-10 km size) features (e.g., temperature/salinity fronts and filaments and their associated currents, as well as eddies, aka vortices) are the primary objects of interest. Better understanding of these features and their dynamics holds much promise to bring us (the community) closer to resolving some mysteries of modern Physical Oceanography, such as the energy cascade (how does energy move from large to small scales) , and closures of vertical mixing and the overturning circulation in the Ocean. These are some of the reasons making this area of research quite exciting. On the more mundane side, it is just great fun to go out on the boat on a beautiful day (and it always is) and observe the Ocean... 

While working in the Mops program I had the opportunity to contribute in co-designing some of the equipment we use, captaining research cruises, guiding interns, and of course analyze amazing data. We usually work in the beautiful Santa Monica Bay, or the California bight in general. But on a few occasions we worked in more remote locations. In 2016 I was happpy to recieve a call to come down to the Gulf of Mexico for a week and help out by operating the equipment in a research plane in the LASER campaign (http://carthe.org/laser/). In April-May 2017 we had the privilege of participating in SPLASH, a large campaign in the Gulf of Mexico (http://carthe.org/splash/), where I took a more active role as the captain and chief scientist of a crew of 4 ;) of the UCLA boat. I lucked out because the Mops principle investigator, Jeroen Molemaker, had a bigger role to play in the campaign, outside of the UCLA boat. This was quite an intense period, and we are now working on a paper with some novel observations we made there regarding narrow fronts which have a substantial inertial component to their dynamics. Meanwhile, I presented preliminary results from that study in a talk in the CARTHE 2017 meeting in RSMAS, as well as in a poster in the GOMRI 2018 conference.