On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the plane were collecting, but she was also aware that the storm’s impact on New Orleans would be devastating. This experience made her realize at a visceral level that science alone is not always enough:

“And so it was that campaign which also made me realize something extremely important, that the best science is not of much use unless it gets to where it needs to go and comes in a form that it can actually be used. And so that’s when I started really thinking  about the interface of science communication, policy, emergency management, all these different factors. […] We as atmospheric scientists form one key component to that, but there’s this whole larger framework that the information that we produce has to fit into in a way that’s going to be usable by all those different stakeholders, so that they can work to, in this case, save lives.”

An Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Deanna studies tropical cyclones, particularly the structure of their rainbands. Her interests also include orographic rain in midlatitudes, and other aspects of cloud and precipitation physics. Growing up in the tornado-prone Dallas area, she became fascinated with extreme weather events at an early age, and got drawn into atmospheric science for real when she realized how much she enjoys participating in field campaigns like the one that gave her a close-up view of Hurricane Katrina.

Deanna has also made questions of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Earth sciences a primary focus of her work — an unusual commitment for a young faculty member working under the pressures of “publish or perish”, and in this interview she talks about that decision and its implications.

The interview with Deanna Hence was recorded in August 2020. 

Brian Mapes fell in love with cumulus clouds when he was looking out an airplane window during his first flight, on the way to Iowa to toil in the fields with his uncle. He was struck by their beauty, but also wanted to understand them scientifically. 

In particular, Brian got interested in how clouds, which are relatively small, are related to weather systems that are much larger, and which is controlling which, how and to what degree. He took issue with the (then-)predominant idea in the field that turbulent convection and clouds are merely a passive response to the large-scale forcing.

“They’re just chiseled from marble, these Midwestern summer clouds. It’s like landscapes, you could imagine romping and playing on them. Except they change every three minutes… It’s like a time evolving landscape. I was just in love with it. And I felt that it had a great amount of life force or something. […] Vigor, agency, life force. I felt like it was a thing that had some heart to it. And then you come, and so you go into that field of science and you come along and you discover the people running the show have decided that it’s a too-complicated-to-care-about response to some forcing. And it drove me batty.”

Before becoming an atmospheric scientist, Brian studied chemistry at Caltech and spent his free time experimenting with explosives of all kind in the Mojave Desert. But he eventually decided to look for a less hazardous field and discovered his fascination with the atmosphere after moving back to his home state of Colorado.

Over the course of his career, which has led him to become professor at the University of Miami, Brian has worked on a lot of different topics, but to him they are all manifestations of the one problem that interests him most, which is the problem of scale.

“[…] it was just echoes and echoes of a philosophical question which is, what’s the relationship between the individual and the collective? That’s the one thing that interests me, and I play it out over here in meteorology, and I’m also fascinated with the social sciences and ecology and stuff, where… It’s everywhere!”

In this interview, you will also hear Brian talk about language and poetry in science, improv, and the role of the appendix in “body politics.”

The interview with Brian Mapes was recorded in January 2020. 

Vishal Vasan, an applied mathematician at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore, India, thinks of himself as a “mathematical salesman”, who uses his mathematical tools and expertise to help potential collaborators in other fields. Vishal’s particular interest are problems involving partial differential equations,
their properties and behavior, and methods for solving them, whether on paper or on the computer.

“This is at least my personal view of applied math. It’s a service. I help other people. I helped people with their homework problems when I was a kid. And I help my colleagues with their math problems now. And if that’s what this leads to, helping other people with their problems, then sure. If I can help I’ll help.”

His eagerness to apply mathematics to real-world problems has led Vishal to work on a wide range of topics: condensed matter physics, optics, water waves  –
especially, tsunamis – and recently also the Indian monsoon. Apart from solving mathematical and scientific problems, Vishal also likes to think and talk about political and societal issues, particularly those that concern his home country:

“I think a lot of India’s problems are not sexy. Which is we don’t require grand solutions. We require things that most of the world has figured out. Toilets. Sewage treatment plants. Garbage disposal plants. I don’t think our problems for now are sexy.”

Having moved back and forth between India, the UK, and the US, Vishal is a perfect example of the internationality of science. Given his own global life trajectory, he is deeply interested in the question of how to form an identity and a sense of belonging in the midst of a tsunami of cultural influences, and in this interview he talks about that as well.

The interview with Vishal Vasan was recorded in December 2019. Image credit: ICTS

Sulochana Gadgil has had a life-long fascination with the Asian monsoon, the seasonally shifting wind pattern driving the rain storms which are the lifeblood of India’s agricultural economy. Born in Pune, she studied mathematics in India and the USA – at Harvard and MIT – before returning to India, where she was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore from 1973 until her retirement a few years ago. 

Sulochana is one of the world’s leading experts on the monsoon, and she has made enormous contributions to its understanding. She has never shied away from questioning the prevailing theories, and she was the first one to demonstrate that, contrary to the explanation still found in many textbook, the monsoon is not a gigantic land-sea breeze. Instead, it is a manifestation of the “intertropical convergence zone”, a migrating planetary-scale system of tropical rain belts. Sulochana has also worked with economists and mathematicians (including her son) to quantify the impact of year-to-year monsoon variations on the Indian economy. They showed that even though the contribution of agriculture to India’s economy has diminished over the last five decades, the impact of droughts on the GDP has remained large (2 to 5%) throughout. 

Apart from her research, Sulochana also talks about growing up as a scientifically-minded girl in Pune, about the Western-centric lens in science and the thinking about environmental problems, and about the challenges of interdisciplinary collaborations.

“But I found to my dismay that agricultural scientists were least interested. Although when you talk to farmers, what is the most important factor impacting your yields, they will say climate. But agricultural scientists since the Green Revolution can only think of different varieties and pesticides and fertilizers.”

The interview with Sulochana Gadgil was recorded in December 2019. Image credit: Adam Sobel

Deep Convection is back with a new season! Starting next Tuesday, February 2nd, we will release a new episode every other week.

In this prologue to Season 2, which was recorded two weeks ago, Melanie asks Adam about his experience making Deep Convection; they look back at the past season and ahead to the upcoming new season. We’ll say this much: Season 2 starts in India, and it features 10 wonderful guests who share stories from their lives in and outside of science. Stay tuned!

Make sure to hit the subscribe button to get all future episodes. You can also find all episodes of Season 1 in the episode archive on this website.

Melanie Bieli is a special guest in more than one way. She’s the first junior scientist to appear on Deep Convection, having just finished her Ph.D. a year ago; but more importantly, she’s the co-creator and creative director of the podcast. So she has been part of all the previous episodes, silently — but on this episode you can actually hear her voice.

Melanie was born and raised in Switzerland. She did her MS degree at ETH Zurich, in Atmospheric Science, and then spent a couple of years working in the reinsurance industry, at Swiss Re in Zurich, studying extreme weather risk. That was a good job, and could easily have led to a permanent career and nice life in her home country. But Melanie didn’t feel challenged enough by that life, so she left to do a Ph.D. in Applied Math at Columbia.

“Whenever I get too comfortable, I make decisions that get me out of my comfort zone.”

Melanie wrote her doctoral thesis on the extratropical transition of tropical cyclones, and is now a postdoc at Caltech working with Tapio Schneider’s CliMA project to design a new climate model. She’s thinking about her next steps. They may or may not be in academia.

You can see all your peers starting their post doc positions and […] my natural reaction to that is, let me not go with the flow.

Melanie and Adam recorded this episode in Costa Rica, while there for the NSF OTREC field campaign, just a few days after Melanie’s thesis defense. Besides her life and career to date, they talk about religion and spirituality, the merits of academic vs. private sector jobs, and how to maximize one’s positive impact on the world.

“Most people want to have, want to feel like they’re having an impact…they want something that’s emotionally satisfying and not necessarily… if you actually evaluate what your contribution is to the world, that would actually look good in that evaluation.”

The interview with Melanie Bieli was recorded in August 2019.

For Ed Sarachik, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, science and art have always been complementary but equally important ingredients to an intellectually fulfilling life. When he was a physics major at Queens College in New York City, his art teacher gave him an assignment that would become a formative art experience: Spending hours at the Frick Collection looking at a Vermeer, Ed started to truly see the painting, the play of light and vividness of the scene that a postcard of the original just can’t capture. He was hooked, and visits to art museums remained an essential counterpart to his professional work throughout his scientific career.

“If it wasn’t for art and music, I don’t think I would have been as good a scientist as I am. It provided an outlet. […] Although there have been times when I’ve done science 12 and 14 hours a day, there’s also times I neglected it entirely, and looked at pictures and listened to music. […] I find it absolutely necessary for my existence, for my intellectual satisfaction. “

Ed struggled to get his career off the ground in a time of federal budget cuts in the 1970s. Eventually though (and thanks also to an encounter with Jule Charney), things turned around: Ed transitioned from laser physics to oceanography and went on to write a series of foundational papers on the dynamics of the equatorial ocean with Mark Cane in the late 1970s. He has worked for many decades on climate problems, and especially those that involve coupling between the ocean and the atmosphere – e.g., he has done important work on the role of the ocean in decadal variability, interannual variability and climate change.

In this interview, Ed and Adam also talk about many other subjects, including how Ed started to think about climate impacts after he got to the University of Washington, why he thinks current climate models are poorly suited to that work and how they should be re-formulated.

The interview with Ed Sarachik was recorded in May 2019.

Amy Clement, professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, loves the ocean. We are mentioning this because her research may seem to suggest otherwise: Amy has proposed bold and controversial ideas about how the role of the ocean in controlling several modes of variability of the climate system may be smaller than most climate scientists had believed.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon relies heavily on the coupling of the atmosphere to the ocean? The sea surface temperature patterns of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) are the result of ocean heat transport? Maybe not, argues Amy. She found that climate models with “deactivated” oceans can produce many aspects of these phenomena with atmospheric forcing alone.

As remarkable as these findings is the way Amy has never been afraid of discussing them with scientists who held strongly opposing views, even when she was a grad student and was much less experienced than her critics. For Amy, science is about leaving your ego at home and focus on the ideas, with openness and curiosity, and a shared goal of advancing our understanding of the earth system.

“As scientists, when someone comes along and says, well let’s look at it differently. Isn’t that fun? If you read the literature, there’s a lot of confirmation bias, to be honest, and less of people saying, ‘how can this idea be wrong?’ And to me, that’s really disappointing.”

As much as she enjoys doing research for the pleasure of figuring things out, she has also been led into climate science by her social consciousness, and in this interview you’ll hear her talk about her work on climate adaptation with a range of groups in Miami, and why she started doing this after waking up the morning after the Presidential election of 2016. Also, she and Adam discuss whether science is the right career for someone who wants to make a difference on climate.

The interview with Amy Clement was recorded in July 2019. Image credit: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/

Faye McNeill studies aerosols, small liquid or solid particles floating in the atmosphere. Each cubic centimeter of air contains hundreds or thousands of these particles – some of them are natural (e.g., dust from dry regions or salt from the ocean) and others are released into the air by human activity, e.g., by cars or factories that burn fossil fuels.

Faye, a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University, studies how aerosols form and evolve, how they influence climate, and how they affect human health. Over the last few months, the coronavirus pandemic has moved the aerosol science community into the international research spotlight, raising many urgent questions about aerosol transmission and COVID-19. These questions were the original motivation for the special episode with Faye, and near the end (at about 1:16) the conversation eventually turns to the pandemic.

But the way the conversation went, most of it is just about Faye’s life and career. Some topics Faye and Adam talk about are the challenge of teaching students how to do research; how important a few words of encouragement from a good mentor can be; and how Faye evolved, step by step, from a young scientist who was intensely focused on the technical challenges of her research, to someone who now sees a much bigger picture of its place in society and has consciously broadened her portfolio in order to make it more directly useful to people.

“And right away we basically identified that as a community, from our own research experience and expertise, we had a suite of tools, things that we could help a city with that’s interested in improving its air pollution. And beyond the technical work there is also this big element of capacity building. “

The interview with Faye McNeill was recorded in May 2020.

This second part of the interview with Mark Cane picks up where Part I left off – at MIT, in the middle of Mark’s PhD. A major focus of the interview is the discovery that made Mark’s career, when he and his student at the time, Steve Zebiak, developed the first dynamical model that could both simulate and predict El Niño events; and then how they ventured to
make an actual real-time prediction, of the 1985-86 event, and then publicized it. That was a bold and risky move, but it paid off.

“The fact that it worked as soon as we started doing realistic things actually added to the sense of confidence. […] We had sweated to make the model work but not to make the forecast work.
So I was fairly confident. And one thought, I thought, and others, that okay, this could do some good if we’re right and people paid attention.”

El Niño and its companion La Niña (collectively referred to as El Niño/Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) are drivers of the strongest year-to-year climate fluctuations on the planet. They alter patterns of weather variability in many places around the globe, including the frequency and severity of extreme events such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and tropical cyclones. Current forecast models can predict these events 6-12 months ahead, and their predictions help to reduce the impacts of ENSO on people and businesses.

The model developed by Mark Cane and Steve Zebiak laid the foundation for this huge success story — ironically, that breakthrough happened just after the biggest disappointment of Mark’s career: He had left MIT after being told that he wouldn’t get tenure. This was no doubt a difficult experience for Mark (and probably a decision MIT has come to regret), even though the many successes in his career by far outweigh that setback.

You can find more information about Mark and his work here.

The interview with Mark Cane was recorded in May 2019.