Xuanyu Chen

I am a physical oceanographer interested in understanding ocean's imprints on the atmospheric boundary layer and eventually, in improving their representations in numerical weather prediction and climate models. Imprints of the ocean can be generated by dynamical features (e.g., ocean surface gravity waves, ocean currents) or thermodynamical features (e.g., sea surface temperature fronts, ocean eddies). During my doctoral research, I studied the first aspect through ocean surface gravity waves. Specifically, I used a numerical ocean surface wave model to investigate how shoaling waves modulate air-sea momentum flux in coastal waters during landfalling hurricanes and its subsequent impacts on storm surge prediction.

I am very keen about combining both observations and high-resolution numerical models to gain process-level understanding of small-scale air-sea interactions. My ultimate goal is that at some point, I can translate the physical understandings gained from observations and modelling into parameterizations used in weather and climate models to better represent air-sea coupling.