By Bill Ibelle
Nicholas Pizzo always loved to surf, so it’s a bit of a surprise that it took as long as it did for him to ride that wave into a career in oceanography.
As an undergraduate at University of California, Santa Barbara, he developed a passion for mathematics and physics as a way of understanding the world around himself. But it wasn’t until the end of his senior year, while conducting research in differential geometry in Brazil, that he found the connection between his recreational and academic passions.
“We were just hanging out one day when someone asked if I had ever considered oceanography,” recalls Pizzo, who arrived at URI in January as an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Oceanography. “That’s when it dawned on me that the ocean would be a fun playground for the application of the type of math and physics
I enjoyed learning about.”
“The communication that takes place through the waves can be crucial to understanding weather and climate.”Nick Pizzo
Pizzo, an expert in fluid dynamics, studies the region where the earth’s two great liquids—the ocean and the atmosphere—meet and interact. More specifically, he studies waves and the complex currents that swirl beneath them.
“The ocean and the atmosphere talk to each other through the wave field,” says Pizzo. “The communication that takes place through the waves can be crucial to understanding weather and climate.”
A current focus of his research is how waves impact mixing in the upper ocean. This is important because existing climate models do not fully capture this complex interaction and therefore cannot accurately predict surface ocean temperatures. Understanding the complex physics of this mixing will improve the prediction of weather and climate events.
“This is an exciting area of physical oceanography,” says Pizzo. “The National Science Foundation recently funded us to further test how current models of this mixing compare with observations of these processes.”
The three-year NSF grant, which is slated to begin this summer, includes four universities—URI, MIT, the University of Delaware, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Pizzo’s portion of the grant is $440,000.
“Until now, this three-way coupling of wind, waves, and currents has been largely ignored because it’s so complicated,” says Pizzo. “Studying these processes will enhance models to improve our ability to predict the weather and climate.”
His recent publication, which appeared as the cover story in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, highlighted this and for the first time showed that you cannot ignore the coupling between these processes if you want to fully understand the resulting mixing.
Pizzo uses a combination of theoretical tools, numerical methods, laboratory experiments and observations to conduct his research. This includes research from the FLIP ship, the famed 355-foot research vessel that flipped 90 degrees in mid-ocean. When 300 feet of the ship was underwater, FLIP provided an enormously stable research platform for studying undersea currents and the interface of waves and air.
With FLIP now retired after a half century of use, his observational research primarily employs uncrewed ocean robots and remote sensing from research aircraft and drones.
Pizzo brings his passion for ocean physics to his teaching at URI, which will begin in August with an undergraduate class on extreme weather and graduate classes on fluid dynamics, waves and physical oceanography.
“The priority at GSO is on training and mentoring the next generation of ocean scientists,” says Pizzo. “Rhode Island offers a wonderful setting to teach people about the ocean and URI has student body whose interest stems from their passion for sailing, surfing and being on the water.”