Alexander Andriatis
I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Environmental Dynamics Laboratory at MIT, where I study ocean turbulence and particle transport. My current work supports understanding the efficacy of marine carbon dioxide removal and the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining. My research spans observational field campaigns using novel instruments, lab studies, and numerical modeling.
I am also a passionate decarbonization advocate and enjoy thinking about solutions for the clean energy transition.
If you'd like to get in touch, send me an email.
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Projects
Near-Inertial Wave Generation
Near-inertial waves are a primary mechanism by which wind energy at the surface of the ocean reaches the interior, mixing the deep ocean. They are generated by horizontal divergences in the inertial oscillations that resonant wind stress drives in the mixed layer, but the fraction of wind work that goes into near-inertial wave energy is poorly constrained, and submesoscale vorticity gradients can enhance the vertical energy flux through refraction. During the Task Force Ocean experiment in November 2020, we observed the generation of near-inertial waves by a storm with a novel array of five drifting Wirewalker profilers, together with a drifting thermistor chain. Despite coherent wind forcing on 100 km scales, the near-inertial wave field varies significantly on 10 km scales. Downward-propagating wave energy is enhanced down the horizontal vorticity gradient across the array, and upward-propagating energy is enhanced in the upper thermocline. The array observations allow an inertial kinetic energy budget of the mixed layer to be constructed, constraining the ratio of wind work to near-inertial wave generation.
Presentations
Andriatis, A., M. H. Alford, L. Lenain, A. J. Lucas, and S. Merrifield: Observations of near-inertial wave vorticity refraction from a drifting Wirewalker array. Gordon Research Conference on Ocean Mixing, June 2024 (poster).
Andriatis, A., M. H. Alford, A. J. Lucas, S. Merrifield, and L. Lenain: An observed mixed layer kinetic energy budget of near-inertial wave generation. Ocean Sciences Meeting, February 2024.
Manuscript in preparation.