research
(above) UMassD hosted an international conference on monsoon research in May 2015 led by Professor Amit Tandon and funded by the Office of Naval Research in the U.S. and the Ministry of Earth Sciences in India. The team is composed of 50 scientists from 19 universities and research institutes.
Predicting monsoons U.S./India ocean currents research project led by UMassD scientists Scientists from the UMass Dartmouth Upper Ocean Dynamics Laboratory are leading a U.S. contingent participating in a firstof-its-kind joint oceanographic venture with scientists from India. The U.S. component of the bilateral program is led by Dr. Amit Tandon, UMass Dartmouth College of Engineering, and Dr. Amala Mahadevan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and adjunct faculty member at UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology. The U.S. team also includes Dr. Sanjiv Ramachandran, Dr. Tandon’s research associate, along with
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SUMMER 2015 www.umassd.edu
scientists from 17 other U.S. and Indian institutions. Researchers from the two countries are working together to understand ocean processes in the Bay of Bengal and their relation to the annual monsoon, which is a dominant factor in the lives of the population of the Indian subcontinent. Improved forecasting of the monsoon and extreme weather events can have enormous human and economic impact in India. For example, in 1999, a powerful cyclone resulted in $4-5 billion in property damage and 10,000 deaths. A comparable cyclone in 2013, with better weather
prediction and storm preparation, caused $700 million in damage and three deaths. “But the monsoon has two faces,” said Dr. Tandon. “It can be a major destructive force, and yet most of the country’s agriculture depends on the timing and amount of the monsoon rains. A fluctuation of just 10 percent from the seasonal norm is the difference between a
‘deficient’ and an ‘excessive’ monsoon.” The U.S. Office of Naval Research is funding the U.S. scientists. The Indian scientists are funded by the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences’ Monsoon Mission. The program, now in its second year, has already logged four joint research and training cruises, with a fifth scheduled for this summer.
(graph at left) This ocean surface picture, which is derived from remote sensing provided by Dr. Tandon’s Indian collaborators in the ASIRI-OMM ocean currents project, provides hints of very active oceanographic processes. During the summer monsoons, even pictures like these are difficult to get from remote sensing due to cloud cover, and in-situ sampling becomes even more necessary to study the upper ocean and understand whether features such as these exist during summer monsoon and how they impact monsoon precipitation.