OASIS - The Zappa Lab

🌊🇮🇹 In October, Prof. Zappa delivered a keynote address at the 2026 CISM (International Center for Mechanical Sciences) Workshop - Interaction of Surface Waves and Turbulence in the Upper Ocean in Udine, Italy. This event brought together global experts to explore small-scale processes at the ocean-atmosphere interface. Prof. Zappa shared research on wind stress partitioning and its modulation by breaking waves measured with the MultIR thermal infrared system.

Prof. Zappa was delighted to reunite with one of his previous students, DEES PhD Sophia Brumer, and a number of close collaborators (Seth Zippel, Marc Buckley, Leonel Romero, Kianoosh Yousefi, and Silvia Matt).

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#AirSeaObs #AirSeaInterface #OceanScience #Oceanography #TurbulentKineticEnergy #AirSeaMomentumFlux #WindStress #WindWaveCoupling
#WaveBreaking #OASIStheZappaLab

📣NEW Zappa Lab publication!

🌊 Discover how wind shapes the uppermost centimeters of the ocean in @Columbia graduate student Junzhe (Jerry) Liu’s first @JGROceans paper: “Near-Surface Ocean Current and Its Response to Wind Forcing”.

Using multiple remote-sensing instruments from the ASIT-2019 field campaign, this study reconstructs ocean current profiles within the top few centimeters of the sea surface. The findings reveal an along-wind skin drift equal to ~3.7% of wind speed, quantify strong near-surface shear to infer viscous stress, and highlight the importance of resolving vertical flow structure for future data assimilation and modeling in the near-surface layer.

This research is supported by @NSF and @NASA

Read the research➡️doi.org/10.1029/2026JC…

#AGUPubs #AirSeaObs #RemoteSensing #UpperOceanProcesses #OceanModeling #Oceanography #AirSeaInterface #SeaSurfaceMicrolayer #Ocean #Science #Research #Publication #OasisTheZappaLab #LDEO #ColumbiaUniversity

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🔬🎨Another successful year of the @LamontEarth Research as Art exhibition! This year, two lab members showcased artworks inspired by their research.

@Columbia DEES graduate student Lindsay Hogan displayed “Thermal Surface Expressions”, which are thermal images of a water surface evolving under growing winds, with wind speed increasing from left to right.

Postdoctoral research scientist Cason Witte’s 3D-printed sculpture “Warming + Wetting Spiral” is inspired by the famous warming spiral graphic, which brings the yearly spiral concept into three dimensions. This work depicts surface equivalent potential temperature, which is effectively moist static energy expressed in temperature units, and reflects the growing energy imbalance in the system, rather than just the sensible heating.

The Research as Art exhibition is inspired by the following ethos: Art and Science are both driven by the desire to make sense of the world around us — to find and understand patterns that emerge from noise. Both artists and scientists strive to see the world in new ways and to communicate that vision. Research as Art provides a platform to celebrate these endeavors and learn about the research going on at Lamont.

#ResearchAsArt #ScienceArt #SciComm #ScienceCommunications #LamontRocks #OceanScience #Oceanography #ClimateResearch #Columbia #OASISTheZappaLab

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📣NEW Zappa Lab publication!

🌊 Discover how rainfall alters global air–sea carbon exchange in Dr. Carson R. Witte’s latest @NatureGeosci paper: “Global carbon dioxide flux into the surface ocean intensified by rain-induced dilution”. By combining high-resolution satellite datasets with a global model of rain-induced surface dilution, this study reveals that rain increases ocean CO2 uptake by 13.6%—doubling previous upper-bound estimates. The findings demonstrate that surface ocean freshening is the main driver of this increase and suggest current global carbon budgets may be underestimating the ocean carbon sink by 10 ± 5%.

Read the study➡️nature.com/articles/s4156…

This research is supported by @NSF

#CarbonDioxideFlux #CO2Flux #CarbonBudget #OceanCarbonSink @CarbonSink #AirSeaInterface #SeaSurfaceMicrolayer #RainInducedDilution

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📣 Zappa Lab participates in NEW collaborative community paper!

🌊Learn how ocean waves are measured using data sets collected in a variety of methods across time in the latest @theAGU Reviews of Geophysics paper: “Measuring Ocean Surface Waves”. Reviewing centuries of observational progress, from 18th-century visual logs to modern LiDAR, autonomous buoys, and satellites, this study synthesizes the vast array of techniques used to measure ocean waves. By highlighting capabilities spanning nearshore acoustic sensing to global spaceborne monitoring, this work makes sense of unprecedented ocean data availability to improve engineering design, navigation, and air-sea interaction models.

Read the paper➡️doi.org/10.1029/2025RG…

The research pertains to the Zappa Lab is supported by @NSF, @NASA, and @USNavyResearch

@LamontEarth
⁩@columbiaclimate
@Columbia
@ColumbiaScience

#AirSeaObs #AirSeaInterface #OceanScience #Oceanography #oceanwaves #wavebreaking