Wijesekera Hemantha W.

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Wijesekera
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Hemantha W.
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  • Article
    Flow Encountering Abrupt Topography (FLEAT): a multiscale observational and modeling program to understand how topography affects flows in the western North Pacific
    (Oceanography Society, 2019-12-11) Johnston, T. M. Shaun ; Schönau, Martha ; Paluszkiewicz, Theresa ; MacKinnon, Jennifer A. ; Arbic, Brian K. ; Colin, Patrick L. ; Alford, Matthew H. ; Andres, Magdalena ; Centurioni, Luca R. ; Graber, Hans C. ; Helfrich, Karl R. ; Hormann, Verena ; Lermusiaux, Pierre F. J. ; Musgrave, Ruth C. ; Powell, Brian S. ; Qiu, Bo ; Rudnick, Daniel L. ; Simmons, Harper L. ; St. Laurent, Louis C. ; Terrill, Eric ; Trossman, David S. ; Voet, Gunnar ; Wijesekera, Hemantha W. ; Zeide, Kristin L.
    Using a combination of models and observations, the US Office of Naval Research Flow Encountering Abrupt Topography (FLEAT) initiative examines how island chains and submerged ridges affect open ocean current systems, from the hundreds of kilometer scale of large current features to the millimeter scale of turbulence. FLEAT focuses on the western Pacific, mainly on equatorial currents that encounter steep topography near the island nation of Palau. Wake eddies and lee waves as small as 1 km were observed to form as these currents flowed around or over the steep topography. The direction and vertical structure of the incident flow varied over tidal, inertial, seasonal, and interannual timescales, with implications for downstream flow. Models incorporated tides and had grids with resolutions of hundreds of meters to enable predictions of flow transformations as waters encountered and passed around Palau’s islands. In addition to making scientific advances, FLEAT had a positive impact on the local Palauan community by bringing new technology to explore local waters, expanding the country’s scientific infrastructure, maintaining collaborations with Palauan partners, and conducting outreach activities aimed at elementary and high school students, US embassy personnel, and Palauan government officials.
  • Article
    Progress in understanding of Indian Ocean circulation, variability, air-sea exchange, and impacts on biogeochemistry
    (European Geosciences Union, 2021-11-26) Phillips, Helen E. ; Tandon, Amit ; Furue, Ryo ; Hood, Raleigh R. ; Ummenhofer, Caroline C. ; Benthuysen, Jessica A. ; Menezes, Viviane V. ; Hu, Shijian ; Webber, Ben ; Sanchez-Franks, Alejandra ; Cherian, Deepak A. ; Shroyer, Emily L. ; Feng, Ming ; Wijesekera, Hemantha W. ; Chatterjee, Abhisek ; Yu, Lisan ; Hermes, Juliet ; Murtugudde, Raghu ; Tozuka, Tomoki ; Su, Danielle ; Singh, Arvind ; Centurioni, Luca R. ; Prakash, Satya ; Wiggert, Jerry D.
    Over the past decade, our understanding of the Indian Ocean has advanced through concerted efforts toward measuring the ocean circulation and air–sea exchanges, detecting changes in water masses, and linking physical processes to ecologically important variables. New circulation pathways and mechanisms have been discovered that control atmospheric and oceanic mean state and variability. This review brings together new understanding of the ocean–atmosphere system in the Indian Ocean since the last comprehensive review, describing the Indian Ocean circulation patterns, air–sea interactions, and climate variability. Coordinated international focus on the Indian Ocean has motivated the application of new technologies to deliver higher-resolution observations and models of Indian Ocean processes. As a result we are discovering the importance of small-scale processes in setting the large-scale gradients and circulation, interactions between physical and biogeochemical processes, interactions between boundary currents and the interior, and interactions between the surface and the deep ocean. A newly discovered regional climate mode in the southeast Indian Ocean, the Ningaloo Niño, has instigated more regional air–sea coupling and marine heatwave research in the global oceans. In the last decade, we have seen rapid warming of the Indian Ocean overlaid with extremes in the form of marine heatwaves. These events have motivated studies that have delivered new insight into the variability in ocean heat content and exchanges in the Indian Ocean and have highlighted the critical role of the Indian Ocean as a clearing house for anthropogenic heat. This synthesis paper reviews the advances in these areas in the last decade.
  • Article
    ASIRI : an ocean–atmosphere initiative for Bay of Bengal
    (American Meteorological Society, 2016-11-22) Wijesekera, Hemantha W. ; Shroyer, Emily L. ; Tandon, Amit ; Ravichandran, M. ; Sengupta, Debasis ; Jinadasa, S. U. P. ; Fernando, Harindra J. S. ; Agrawal, Neeraj ; Arulananthan, India K. ; Bhat, G. S. ; Baumgartner, Mark F. ; Buckley, Jared ; Centurioni, Luca R. ; Conry, Patrick ; Farrar, J. Thomas ; Gordon, Arnold L. ; Hormann, Verena ; Jarosz, Ewa ; Jensen, Tommy G. ; Johnston, T. M. Shaun ; Lankhorst, Matthias ; Lee, Craig M. ; Leo, Laura S. ; Lozovatsky, Iossif ; Lucas, Andrew J. ; MacKinnon, Jennifer A. ; Mahadevan, Amala ; Nash, Jonathan D. ; Omand, Melissa M. ; Pham, Hieu ; Pinkel, Robert ; Rainville, Luc ; Ramachandran, Sanjiv ; Rudnick, Daniel L. ; Sarkar, Sutanu ; Send, Uwe ; Sharma, Rashmi ; Simmons, Harper L. ; Stafford, Kathleen M. ; St. Laurent, Louis C. ; Venayagamoorthy, Subhas K. ; Venkatesan, Ramasamy ; Teague, William J. ; Wang, David W. ; Waterhouse, Amy F. ; Weller, Robert A. ; Whalen, Caitlin B.
    Air–Sea Interactions in the Northern Indian Ocean (ASIRI) is an international research effort (2013–17) aimed at understanding and quantifying coupled atmosphere–ocean dynamics of the Bay of Bengal (BoB) with relevance to Indian Ocean monsoons. Working collaboratively, more than 20 research institutions are acquiring field observations coupled with operational and high-resolution models to address scientific issues that have stymied the monsoon predictability. ASIRI combines new and mature observational technologies to resolve submesoscale to regional-scale currents and hydrophysical fields. These data reveal BoB’s sharp frontal features, submesoscale variability, low-salinity lenses and filaments, and shallow mixed layers, with relatively weak turbulent mixing. Observed physical features include energetic high-frequency internal waves in the southern BoB, energetic mesoscale and submesoscale features including an intrathermocline eddy in the central BoB, and a high-resolution view of the exchange along the periphery of Sri Lanka, which includes the 100-km-wide East India Coastal Current (EICC) carrying low-salinity water out of the BoB and an adjacent, broad northward flow (∼300 km wide) that carries high-salinity water into BoB during the northeast monsoon. Atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) observations during the decaying phase of the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) permit the study of multiscale atmospheric processes associated with non-MJO phenomena and their impacts on the marine boundary layer. Underway analyses that integrate observations and numerical simulations shed light on how air–sea interactions control the ABL and upper-ocean processes.
  • Article
    Eddies, topography, and the abyssal flow by the Kyushu-Palau Ridge near Velasco Reef
    (The Oceanography Society, 2019-12-11) Andres, Magdalena ; Siegelman, Mika ; Hormann, Verena ; Musgrave, Ruth C. ; Merrifield, Sophia T. ; Rudnick, Daniel L. ; Merrifield, Mark ; Alford, Matthew H. ; Voet, Gunnar ; Wijesekera, Hemantha W. ; MacKinnon, Jennifer A. ; Centurioni, Luca R. ; Nash, Jonathan D. ; Terrill, Eric
    Palau, an island group in the tropical western North Pacific at the southern end of Kyushu-Palau Ridge, sits near the boundary between the westward-​flowing North Equatorial Current (NEC) and the eastward-flowing North Equatorial Countercurrent. Combining remote-sensing observations of the sea surface with an unprecedented in situ set of subsurface measurements, we examine the flow near Palau with a particular focus on the abyssal circulation and on the deep expression of mesoscale eddies in the region. We find that the deep currents time-averaged over 10 months are generally very weak north of Palau and not aligned with the NEC in the upper ocean. This weak abyssal flow is punctuated by the passing of mesoscale eddies, evident as sea surface height anomalies, that disrupt the mean flow from the surface to the seafloor. Eddy influence is observed to depths exceeding 4,200 m. These deep-​reaching mesoscale eddies typically propagate westward past Palau, and as they do, any associated deep flows must contend with the topography of the Kyushu-Palau Ridge. This interaction leads to vertical structure far below the main thermocline. Observations examined here for one particularly strong and well-sampled eddy suggest that the flow was equivalent barotropic in the far field east and west of the ridge, with a more complicated vertical structure in the immediate vicinity of the ridge by the tip of Velasco Reef.
  • Article
    Bay of Bengal intraseasonal oscillations and the 2018 monsoon onset
    (American Meteorological Society, 2021-10-01) Shroyer, Emily L. ; Tandon, Amit ; Sengupta, Debasis ; Fernando, Harindra J. S. ; Lucas, Andrew J. ; Farrar, J. Thomas ; Chattopadhyay, Rajib ; de Szoeke, Simon P. ; Flatau, Maria ; Rydbeck, Adam ; Wijesekera, Hemantha W. ; McPhaden, Michael J. ; Seo, Hyodae ; Subramanian, Aneesh C. ; Venkatesan, Ramasamy ; Joseph, Jossia K. ; Ramsundaram, S. ; Gordon, Arnold L. ; Bohman, Shannon M. ; Pérez, Jaynise ; Simoes-Sousa, Iury T. ; Jayne, Steven R. ; Todd, Robert E. ; Bhat, G. S. ; Lankhorst, Matthias ; Schlosser, Tamara L. ; Adams, Katherine ; Jinadasa, S. U. P. ; Mathur, Manikandan ; Mohapatra, Mrutyunjay ; Pattabhi Rama Rao, Eluri ; Sahai, Atul Kumar ; Sharma, Rashmi ; Lee, Craig ; Rainville, Luc ; Cherian, Deepak A. ; Cullen, Kerstin ; Centurioni, Luca R. ; Hormann, Verena ; MacKinnon, Jennifer A. ; Send, Uwe ; Anutaliya, Arachaporn ; Waterhouse, Amy F. ; Black, Garrett S. ; Dehart, Jeremy A. ; Woods, Kaitlyn M. ; Creegan, Edward ; Levy, Gad ; Kantha, Lakshmi ; Subrahmanyam, Bulusu
    In the Bay of Bengal, the warm, dry boreal spring concludes with the onset of the summer monsoon and accompanying southwesterly winds, heavy rains, and variable air–sea fluxes. Here, we summarize the 2018 monsoon onset using observations collected through the multinational Monsoon Intraseasonal Oscillations in the Bay of Bengal (MISO-BoB) program between the United States, India, and Sri Lanka. MISO-BoB aims to improve understanding of monsoon intraseasonal variability, and the 2018 field effort captured the coupled air–sea response during a transition from active-to-break conditions in the central BoB. The active phase of the ∼20-day research cruise was characterized by warm sea surface temperature (SST > 30°C), cold atmospheric outflows with intermittent heavy rainfall, and increasing winds (from 2 to 15 m s−1). Accumulated rainfall exceeded 200 mm with 90% of precipitation occurring during the first week. The following break period was both dry and clear, with persistent 10–12 m s−1 wind and evaporation of 0.2 mm h−1. The evolving environmental state included a deepening ocean mixed layer (from ∼20 to 50 m), cooling SST (by ∼1°C), and warming/drying of the lower to midtroposphere. Local atmospheric development was consistent with phasing of the large-scale intraseasonal oscillation. The upper ocean stores significant heat in the BoB, enough to maintain SST above 29°C despite cooling by surface fluxes and ocean mixing. Comparison with reanalysis indicates biases in air–sea fluxes, which may be related to overly cool prescribed SST. Resolution of such biases offers a path toward improved forecasting of transition periods in the monsoon.