Jun-Hong Liang, associate professor in the Louisiana State University Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences, or DOCS, has received a five-year National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development, or NSF CAREER, award. The CAREER award is one of the NSF's most prestigious awards and is bestowed upon junior faculty who "have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization." This award will support his research into how ocean bubbles play an important role in upper ocean dynamics and in air-sea gas exchange and to enrich the curriculum in physical oceanography and outreach activities at LSU and in local communities.
According to Kam-biu Liu, the George W. Barineau III Professor and chair of DOCS, "For an assistant professor, if you get a CAREER award, it is like a stamp of approval from your peers in the field. Jun-Hong is a top-notch and innovative researcher in his field. His research on turbulence in the upper layer of the ocean and air-sea interaction is cutting-edge and highly regarded by his peers in physical oceanography. He is truly deserving of this honor."
Liang is one of two professors in the history of the LSU College of the Coast & Environment to receive an NSF CAREER award. The first was awarded to Sam Bentley in 2001, a then-assistant professor in DOCS. Bentley now serves as the vice president of the LSU Office of Research & Economic Development.
"I am so happy for Jun-Hong. Receiving an NSF CAREER award can be a life changing event. It was for me. CAREERs are more than science proposals, they are deeply personal and aspirational statements. Jun-Hong's work at the oceanic-atmospheric boundary layer is really important, exciting and unique, impacting everything from ocean waves to global warming," Bentley said.
Liang will receive approximately $472,000 to continue his research and educational activities. According to Liang, funding for this research is vital because "bubbles in the ocean are the cousins of clouds in the atmosphere. They are very challenging to observe and simulate, while we now know that they play important roles in ocean dynamics, ocean acoustics, ocean optics, marine aerosols, geoengineering, and air-sea gas exchange." With a computer model that he has developed and improved, Liang will produce high-resolution simulations of ocean currents, gas bubbles, and dissolved gases using LSU's supercomputing facilities. With these simulations, Liang will be looking at how bubbles move under the influence of chaotic and turbulent ocean currents, how those bubbles alter water motions and transport important gases, such as oxygen and carbon dioxide, between the ocean and the atmosphere.
Also, Liang anticipates that this research will produce physics-based formulas to calculate air-sea gas flux. These formulas can help to better constrain the budget of gases--for example, carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas in the earth system that contributes to climate change. They may also help interpret the measurement of gases for ocean biogeochemical processes more accurately. For example, oxygen, nitrogen and argon measurements are currently used to infer biological activities, such as photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen fixation and denitrification. Accurate calculation of air-sea gas flux improves those estimates. Another important product of the research will be improved predictive formulas for the movement of buoyant pollutants, such as spilled oil and microplastics, which have recently emerged as major threats to ocean environment.
More broadly, this research will improve scientists' abilities to predict marine environment and climatic changes, and will provide decision makers in politics and industry with sound scientific input on a range of issues, including climate, environment, fisheries, energy and marine pollution mitigation.
This award will empower Liang to advance not only LSU's research but also its education and community outreach. Liang intends to use his research results to produce educational materials for use by K-12 teachers, to build a series of hand-on experiments and demonstrations that can be used for educational outreach and to further develop a series of stimulating undergraduate and graduate classes at LSU.
"My hope is that this will attract local middle and high school students to the field of oceanography, raise awareness of the ocean's importance to our way of life among both students and the community and further enrich the oceanography curriculum at LSU," Liang said. View the NSF award abstract for "CAREER: Mechanistic modeling of turbulent bubbly flows in the ocean surface boundary layer."
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