Distinguished Professor Eckart Meiburg of UCSB

The transport of heat, CO2, and other substances by ocean currents plays a crucial role in shaping Earth's climate. I will highlight some of the important mechanisms that dominate the dynamics of the ocean and generate large-scale ocean currents. I will discuss the basic concepts underlying our approaches for modeling and predicting the dynamics of the ocean on the computer, and I will introduce some of the smaller-scale models that we have developed in my research group. To illustrate the power of such computational models, I will show several computer-generated movies of oceanic transport processes.

Biography:

Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering Eckart Meiburg (PhD ME, U. Karlsruhe, Germany, 1985) joined UCSB in 2000, after appointments at Stanford University, Brown University, and USC. His research focuses on the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics, with a special focus on environmental and multiphase flows. Dr. Meiburg is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He has received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, a Senior Scientist Award from the Humboldt Foundation, and a Senior Gledden Fellowship from the University of Western Australia. He was the Straub Lecturer at the University of Minnesota, and the Probstein Lecturer at MIT. He has held visiting positions in Europe, Australia ,and the US, and he is currently Past Chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society.