Baylor Fox-Kemper
Brown University, RI·Earth & Environmental Science
The ocean's thin, well-mixed surface layer constantly trades heat, carbon and nutrients with the colder, layered water beneath it. That exchange shapes how much heat and carbon the ocean absorbs from the atmosphere and how much plankton can grow.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
physical oceanography
submesoscale
ocean mixed layer
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Quantify how adding entrainment fluxes to a widely used parameterization of submesoscale mixed-layer instability changes Reynolds-averaged simulations of the Southern Ocean that include ocean biogeochemistry.
- Determine, using large-eddy simulations, how submesoscale instabilities, wave-driven Langmuir turbulence and small-scale 3D turbulence interact to change entrainment and subduction of tracers at the base of the mixed layer.
- Develop new tracer and eddy-flux diagnostics grounded in boundary-layer energetics and potential vorticity dynamics to separate the mechanisms driving surface–interior exchange.
- Run large-domain LES spanning about 1 m to 10 km as exascale benchmarks and release them for community study of submesoscale and Langmuir turbulence and physical-biogeochemical interactions.
More about the research
Much of it happens at the submesoscale: swirls and fronts hundreds to thousands of meters across, small enough that Earth's rotation matters but does not dominate. Climate models cannot resolve these features, so they rely on simplified rules called parameterizations. Current rules leave out entrainment, the drawing of deeper water up into the surface layer. The grant states that this omission badly underestimates submesoscale effects on long-term carbon and heat uptake.
Why it matters
Climate projections depend on how much heat and carbon the ocean takes up, and current models underestimate the contribution of small-scale surface exchange. Better parameterizations could improve community ocean and climate models' estimates of long-term heat and carbon uptake and plankton productivity, especially in the Southern Ocean. Openly shared high-resolution simulations could also help researchers interpret ocean observations.
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.
Amrapalli Garanaik
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop a new second-moment model of the upper ocean boundary layer that represents both local and nonlocal turbulent transport, tuned to observations and Large-Eddy Simulation results.
Junhong Liang
Florida State University, FL·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Test whether stochastically distributed breaking waves change bubble trajectories and bubble-mediated gas flux by altering ocean surface boundary layer turbulence and by generating bubbles within downwelling currents, using a large eddy simulation coupled to a Lagrangian bubble model.
The school
Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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