SST Control by Subsurface Mixing during Indian Ocean Monsoons

: This grant supports Oregon State University PhD candidate Kerstin Cullen, who is framing her thesis work from efforts associated with the ongoing Air-sea Interactions Research Initiative in the Bay of Bengal DRI. Kerstin has completed her first year of classes and passed her written comprehensive exam this summer. She has already made substantial strides in her research- looking at the structure, variability, and dynamics of the Sri Lanka Dome (SLD). She is combining remote sensing, historical CTD data, Argo profiles, and data from the recently recovered Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) mooring array, which includes turbulent mixing sensors (pods), to explore the upper ocean mixed layer properties within the SLD and modification of air-sea fluxes associated with the SLD. She recently participated in the August-September 2015 ASIRI cruise in the Bay of Bengal. She also attended and presented a poster at the University of Massachusetts ASIRI meeting in Spring 2015. She will work in close collaboration with PIs from Oregon State (Shroyer, Moum, and Nash), UW (Lee and Rainville), and NRL (Wijesekera).