I took a class on analog electronics (using Horowitz and Hill, of course) at UCSB from Martinis as an undergraduate and I remember him as an enthusiastic teacher who always had time to answer questions.

Hey fluids friends, we're recruiting in my department this year!

It's great that @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social is on bluesky -- I've learned a ton from him about math and physics over the years. 🧪🔭

🦞💙 Happy #NationalLobsterDay! Meet the star of the Ann Gall Durbin Aquarium on the University of Rhode Island's Bay Campus: a rare blue lobster, found in the wild in about one in two million! 🦑 🌊

Also read about this on Tom's blog! 🌊 mrtomsblog.com/instruments/

In the 1960s and 70s, Syukuro Manabe pioneered ways to model Earth’s atmosphere. In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which is often cited as foundational to modern climate science.

Bon voyage to our lab member Katie Stone on the very last @urigso.bsky.social R/V Endeavor cruise! As the sole URI scientist aboard, Katie is the last URI scientist to sail on this historic vessel that began its work in 1976.

Video is almost certainly real. From colleagues in Russia:

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If you happen to be interested in ocean mixing variability, stratified turbulence, or the fate of shoaling nonlinear internal waves on the inner shelf, our recent study has just appeared in JPO: journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal.... Fun to work on this with @alexisonfluids.bsky.social & crew! 🌊🌊🌊

Happy #WorldOceanDay! 🌊🧪 Photo of Kelvin-Helmoltz instability: Nick Statom

Fun new paper at #SIGGRAPH2025: What if instead of two 6-sided dice, you could roll a single "funky-shaped" die that gives the same statistics (e.g, 7 is twice as likely as 4 or 10). Or make fair dice in any shape—e.g., dragons rather than cubes? That's exactly what we do! 1/n

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We have two articles (both by first-time scientific authors) in GRL! First up, led by PhD student Lulabel Ruiz Seitz, we find a simple interaction between lateral stirring and biology that has implications for modeling and observing cross-shore fluxes. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

We often use discretization to approximate continuous laws of physics, but it also goes the other way: You can use continuous equations to approximate the behavior of discrete systems! Here we'll see how electrical circuits can be modeled using the Laplace equation Δφ=0. [1/n]

🧪 SWOT, a recently launched NASA satellite, is about to teach us a lot about the heterogeneity of ocean wave fields

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Greg Wagner and I just published a paper (link.springer.com/article/10.1...) on wave momentum. It is well known that waves packets in deep water have no momentum, yet it takes momentum to generate them in the first place. Where does that initial momentum go?

Changing the game! We need to make sure we reward work like this (eg highly usable code)

This cute simulation of a jetting body came about as I helped fix WaterLily.jl issue #200(!) github.com/WaterLily-jl... #Julia

🎉 Congratulations to #URIGSO's Randy Watts, research professor of oceanography, who was recognized for 50 years of service to the University of Rhode Island at last week's employee milestone celebration. He has spent his career here reseraching strong ocean current systems. 🌊 ➡️ buff.ly/3PNxi3a

To high line or bottom turn? One of the more surreal reviews of my work by pro surfer/scientist Dr Cliff Kapono: www.surfer.com/how-to/cliff... 🌊🧪 @urigso.bsky.social

Really impressive, and scary, results from all star WHOI postdoc Iury Simoes-Sousa and colleagues on an extreme weather flooding event [disaster] in Southern Brazil from May of 2024. A striking example of the capabilities of NASA's recently launched SWOT satellite to monitor floods. 🧪

A fun read on how knowledge of approximate solutions to Schrodinger's eqtn (and careful tuning of Anderson localization) has led to a decrease of energy usage in US households largely through lighting efficiencies, moving from incandescent lightbulbs to LEDs:🧪 terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/23/c...

The Surf Lab just had our belated holiday party, which was a well timed jolt of fun and curiosity. We built a glider, ate pizza, and watched "Wind".

🧪 See what some of us in the ocean state are thinking about! (Picture from the swell last weekend)

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Great writing by Kasha Patel from the Washington Post summarizing our recent AMOC article @polarocean.bsky.social @linusvogt.bsky.social : www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

vorticity distribution for 2d flow on a non-rotating (left) and rotating sphere (right). curvature and rotation arrest the inverse cascade and leads to zonal jet patterns. but, the stat mech predictions are the same: the energy (eventually) ends up in the lowest available mode in both cases. 🌊🧪

vorticity distribution of 2d flow on a non-rotating sphere 🧪🌊

I keep joking that I'm a quantum oceanographer, so my colleagues forced the issue. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Led by #URIGSO's Jaime Palter, a new study is underway to explore how coastal liming could mitigate ocean acidification in nearby waters, foster carbon dioxide removal, and export alkalinity to the open ocean along the East Coast. 🌱🌊 #OceanAcidificationDayofAction

The Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social is looking for new faculty members! Surely one of the best gigs in the world. santafe.edu/about/jobs/r...

The holidays season is a good time of pause to look back. In 1984 J. Battjes wrote : "The ideal of having instrumental wave data [.] at constant intervals during a long time span is presently unattainable [.] Routine programs of satellite-based remote sensing may change this on a global scale. 🌊

The Harvest buoy was reading ~24 feet at 22 seconds today -- yikes! 🌊🧪

🌊 AGU is starting and I can't wait to join up tomorrow after closing out my teaching here in Rhode Island this afternoon. A summer student, Nate Newell, and postdoc Una Miller presented a poster this morning on use of Saildrone to explore the role of the Gulf Stream on winter winds. So proud!

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🚨 The Alker Lab is starting at the University of Rhode Island in early 2025 and we will be hiring! 🚨 If you are interested in marine microbiology, bacterial genetics and/or symbiosis, please consider reaching out! Repost to help spread the word 🪸🧪🧬🌊

Come do a PhD with Channing Prend and myself! The project will use seal data and models to understand Antarctic Slope Current dynamics. Based in Edinburgh, UK, but with opportunities for time in Australia also. e4-dtp.ed.ac.uk/e5-dtp/super... 🌊

The curve assumed by a perfectly elastic rod subject to longitudinal thrust is known as an elastica. Maxwell showed it's also the curve followed by particles near a uniformly translating cylinder (here I show the periodic extension).

We often think of an "equilibrium" as something standing still, like a scale in perfect balance. But many equilibria are dynamic, like a flowing river which is never changing—yet never standing still. These dynamic equilibria are nicely described by so-called "detailed balance"

Hi friends! Here is a piece I wrote for Scientific American on some marine CO2 removal approaches. TLDR: Let's do great research to know if these strategies might help, but don't assume any of them will (and be especially skeptical that manipulating marine biology can safely remove carbon).

🚀At NASA's #PACE Hackweek, Sarah Lang, Ph.D. candidate at #URIGSO, worked on a multi-institutional team to explore how mesoscale eddies—swirling ocean currents spanning 10-100 km—affect phytoplankton ecosystems. These ecosystems are vital to the overall health of oceanic ecosystems & future climate.