Department of Physical Oceanography
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MS 29
Clark Laboratory, Room 224
Woods Hole, MA 02543
Tel: 1 508 289 3440
amala_at_whoi.edu

My interests are in oceanography and climate, biogeochemical cycles in the ocean -the ocean's role in the carbon cycle, phytoplankton and biogeochemical distributions and air-sea gas exchange. I use modeling to investigate physical ocean processes and their implications on ocean biogeochemistry. I have developed a non-hydrostatic ocean model suited to modeling limited domains in order to capture meso- and submesoscale phenomena. Consequently I have worked on the problem of open boundary conditions for ocean models, the vertical transport of nutrients by frontal and submesoscale processes in the subtropical oceans, the large-scale transport and distribution of radiocarbon (14C), predictability of the large-scale wind-driven circulation using singular vectors, the dynamics of the shelfbreak front and coastal flows over topography, patchiness in the distributions of various biogeochemical tracers at the sea surface, and mesoscale variability of sea surface pCO2. More recently, I have been working on the interaction between hydrodynamics and vegetation in coastal areas. A broad objective of my research is to understand the feedbacks between physical processes, the autotrophic (plant) community and the carbon cycle.