Student Receives Award at Meteorological Conference

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) held its 35^th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology in New Orleans, Louisiana in May 2022. This year Nova Southeastern University Ph.D. student Breanna Vanderplow from the Physical Oceanography Laboratory at the Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences/Halmos College of Arts and Sciences was chosen for the Outstanding Student Oral Presentation Award.

Vanderplow presented her work on the new research that may help predict hurricane intensification in the presence of natural (biological) or anthropogenic (oil spill, dispersants) surfactants. Vanderplow is the first author of the paper titled “Increased Sea Spray Generation Due to Surfactants: An Insight Into Tropical Cyclone Intensity?” a result of collaboration with scientists from the University of Hawaii, University of Miami, and University of Rhode Island.

The research involved laboratory experiments at the UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science SUSTAIN facility, a numerical model developed at NSU using the state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics software ANSYS Fluent, and NSU’s supercomputer.

The laboratory lead and the paper co-author Professor Alexander Soloviev, Ph.D., said that hurricane track forecasting has seen continuous improvement during the last half century.

“At the same time, prediction of hurricane intensity, especially rapid intensification, has seen only a little or no improvement,” he said. “Furthermore, hurricane researchers are still debating why rapid intensification happens. One hypothesis is that hurricane intensity can depend on the microphysics of the air-sea interface that has not yet been implemented in operational hurricane forecasting models.“

The Physical Oceanography Laboratory is currently working on a pioneering approach to implement microphysics of the air-sea interface in  hurricane forecasting models. Vanderplow has made an important contribution in this direction.

Vanderplow graduated from the NSU Honors College and was a recipient of the NSU President’s Scholarship. She received her MS Degree from the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences and is now a Ph.D. student at the Physical Oceanography Laboratory. She considers it a great privilege to be able to present her work at this conference and any conferences where she can represent NSU.

Posted 07/17/22