Rob Hetland

COMPASS-Great Lakes Modeling

I am the PI of a two-year pilot study, COMPASS-GLM, that aims to enhance predictive understanding of freshwater coastal systems, especially how they respond to climate warming, Land Use Land Cover Change, and other perturbations at watershed-to-regional scales. This includes local climate and weather feedbacks that affect wintertime lake effect snows and summertime convective storms. The project is focused on two tasks. Task 1 is a coupled regional climate model of the Great Lakes region with a downscaled component examining coastal urban heat island effects around Chicago and the interactions with convective storms that cause local flooding. Task 2 is focused on process-resolving simulations of event-scale streamflow and nutrient removal the Portage river watershed.

Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM)

I am PI for cross-cutting activities in the Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project, focused on the role of coastal development patterns in driving natural system changes, including key biogeochemical and hydrological processes, and on evaluating the strengths and limitations associated with different coastal modeling techniques. I am leading an activity to evaluate numerical mixing in coastal ocean model test cases, focusing on comparing MPAS-Ocean and the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) in their ability to reproduce idealized coastal circulation features, such as baroclinic eddies on the shelf.

SUNRISE

I am participating in the NSF funded SUNRISE project. Near-inertial motions (oscillations near the Coriolis frequency) and submesoscales (1-10km) are ubiquitous and important features of the upper ocean; recent work has shown that near-inertial motions (NIOs) can directly interact with submesoscales and upper ocean turbulence, but these interactions are poorly understood. This project seeks to create a unified dynamical description of near-inertial and submesoscale motions and their influence on turbulent mixing. My research has focused on high-resolution regional ocean modeling using the TXLA application of the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) ocean model.