Ryan P. Abernathey

About

Ryan P. Abernathey is an Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2012 and his B.A. from Middlebury College. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he joined Columbia in 2013. His research focuses on physical oceanography, specifically the large-scale ocean circulation and its relationship with Earth's climate. A central theme of his work is understanding how ocean mesoscale turbulence, including eddies, waves, and jets on scales of tens to hundreds of kilometers, contributes to the transport of momentum, heat, and geochemically relevant tracers. His regional focus is the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica and links the three main ocean basins. Abernathey employs high-resolution numerical modeling and satellite remote sensing in his research, which has fostered an interest in high-performance computing and big data. He has been recognized with several awards, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Ocean Sciences and an NSF CAREER award for his project on the evolution of mesoscale turbulence in a changing climate. Additionally, he has received a NASA New Investigator Award and a Columbia Research Initiatives for Science and Engineering (RISE) grant to apply machine learning techniques to ocean satellite observations. Abernathey is an active advocate for open source software, open data, and…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Geology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Meteorology
• Oceanography
• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Algorithm
• Data science
• Geophysics

Selected publications

• Cloud-Native Repositories for Big Scientific Data

  Computing in Science & Engineering · 2021 · 127 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Scientific data have traditionally been distributed via downloads from data server to local computer. This way of working suffers from limitations as scientific datasets grow toward the petabyte scale. A “cloud-native data repository,” as defined in this article, offers several advantages over traditional data repositories-performance, reliability, cost-effectiveness, collaboration, reproducibility, creativity, downstream impacts, and access and inclusion. These objectives motivate a set of best…

  DOI

• Vertical eddy iron fluxes support primary production in the open Southern Ocean

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 105 citations

  The primary productivity of the Southern Ocean ecosystem is limited by iron availability. Away from benthic and aeolian sources, iron reaches phytoplankton primarily when iron-rich subsurface waters enter the euphotic zone. Here, eddy-resolving physical/biogeochemical simulations of a seasonally-forced, open-Southern-Ocean ecosystem reveal that mesoscale and submesoscale isopycnal stirring effects a cross-mixed-layer-base transport of iron that sustains primary productivity. The eddy-driven iron…

  DOI

• Ventilation of the Southern Ocean Pycnocline

  Annual Review of Marine Science · 2021 · 81 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Ocean ventilation is the transfer of tracers and young water from the surface down into the ocean interior. The tracers that can be transported to depth include anthropogenic heat and carbon, both of which are critical to understanding future climate trajectories. Ventilation occurs in both high- and midlatitude regions, but it is the southern midlatitudes that are responsible for the largest fraction of anthropogenic heat and carbon uptake; such Southern Ocean ventilation is the focus of this r…

  DOI

• Diffusion‐Based Smoothers for Spatial Filtering of Gridded Geophysical Data

  Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems · 2021 · 71 citations

  Abstract We describe a new way to apply a spatial filter to gridded data from models or observations, focusing on low‐pass filters. The new method is analogous to smoothing via diffusion, and its implementation requires only a discrete Laplacian operator appropriate to the data. The new method can approximate arbitrary filter shapes, including Gaussian filters, and can be extended to spatially varying and anisotropic filters. The new diffusion‐based smoother's properties are illustrated with exa…

  DOI

• A global Lagrangian eddy dataset based on satellite altimetry

  Earth system science data · 2023-04-19 · 23 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract. The methods used to identify coherent ocean eddies are either Eulerian or Lagrangian in nature, and nearly all existing eddy datasets are based on the Eulerian method. In this study, millions of Lagrangian particles are advected by satellite-derived surface geostrophic velocities over the period of 1993–2019. Using the method of Lagrangian-averaged vorticity deviation (LAVD), we present a global Lagrangian eddy dataset (GLED v1.0, Liu and Abernathey, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenod…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Evolution of Ocean Mesoscale Turbulence in a Changing Climate

  NSF · $763k · 2016–2022

• Collaborative Research: The Upper Branch of the Southern Ocean Overturning in the Southern Ocean State Estimate: Water Mass Transformation and the 3-D Residual Circulation

  NSF · $102k · 2014–2019

• Collaborative Research: Ocean Transport and Eddy Energy

  NSF · $49k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Dhruv Balwada

  Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

  68 shared

• K. Shafer Smith

  57 shared

• Takaya Uchida

  Université Grenoble Alpes

  46 shared

• Qiyu Xiao

  Hunan Cancer Hospital

  45 shared

• Joseph Hamman

  33 shared

• Jonathan Gula

  Ifremer

  32 shared

• Aurélien Ponte

  Ifremer

  31 shared

• Tongya Liu

  Second Institute of Oceanography

  30 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2012

• BA, Physics

  Middlebury College

  2004

Awards & honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Ocean Sciences (2016)
• NSF CAREER award for a project entitled “Evolution of Mesosc…
• NASA New Investigator Award (2013)
• Columbia Research Initiatives for Science and Engineering (R…

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