Principal Investigator
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building (ISEB) 3084,
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-2700, USA
(949) 824-9230
Tirtha Banerjee: Faculty Profile.
Postdoctoral Scholars
(Jointly advised by Prof. Efi Foufoula-Georgiou and Prof. Tirtha Banerjee)
Janine’s passion lies in understanding surface-atmospheric interactions and its physical processes within the realm of meteorology and physical climatology as well as presenting and sharing her research with a wide audience. Jointly advised by Professors Tirtha Banerjee and Efi Foula-Georgiou, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Janine’s research focuses on weather and hydroclimate related hazards, with a focus on wildfire meteorology.
She obtained her Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. Her research focused on conducting historical spatiotemporal trends in meso-beta scale extreme snowfall and lake effect snowfall predictor variables for the under-studied regions of the Canadian Laurentian Great Lakes. In graduate school she worked as a research associate at NASA Ames in California, conducting in-laboratory simulations for testing and developing early warning signals for predicting major earthquakes. She also spent the past six years working as a television and radio Meteorologist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (CBC) in Toronto, producing and broadcasting her forecasts on multiple platforms (television, radio, digital) locally and nationally.
Recently, she completed her Postdoctoral Research at McGill University, Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, working with the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative team. Her research assessed both the biophysical and socio-economic impacts of climate change on subarctic communities using the state-of-the-art high-resolution Global Environmental Multiscale Model (GEM_CLIM). She also has teaching experience and has taught Natural Disasters, a course offered by McGill’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department, that focuses on scientific perspectives and predictions of hurricanes, El Nino, ice storms, tornados, and climate change. She was responsible for preparing formal lectures, leading class discussions, creating and administering exams and course assignments, and managing a class of over 600 students and 20 Teaching Assistants.
My research interests lie on mathematical formulation and computational implementation of natural processes with emphasis on fluid mechanics. Currently joining a Postdoctoral scholar position at the University of California, Irvine and under the supervision of Tirtha Banerjee, physical based models are developed, in the effort to uncover the fundamental driving mechanisms of wildfires.
During my PhD at Washington State University, the research was focused on fluid flows driven by capillary forces in zero/micro gravity conditions. My contribution on this project was to build a mathematical model which describes fluid motion on wetting and non-wetting solid substrates. The motivation of this research, which was funded by NASA BRAINS project, was on micrometeorites and orbital debris which may penetrate the outer shells of man-made objects. A repair scenario was proposed based on brazing in space, while diffusive and sharp interface models with moving boundaries (contact lines) were used to predict dynamics and equilibria.
In the heart of those two phenomenologically different problems lies the multiscale nature of their physical processes. Is there any physics-based model that could capture molecular scale interactions (motion of contact lines and chemical reactions) and surface tension forces? If yes, up to what degree? How could we build a bridge between chemical reactions(molecular scale) in the process of combustion and the transport of that energy release(macroscale)? Under what dissipative mechanisms these questions can be addressed?
As a PhD intern at Pacific Northwest National Lab, I worked on the numerical implementation of the non-local model along with level set method and diffusive boundary conditions. The model expresses the surface tension forces as a molecular-force like function, enable us to capture flow’s characteristics in a wide range scale. During my master’s and undergraduate program at Washington State University and University of Crete, I developed computational and theoretical skills in mathematics including continuum mechanics (solids and fluids) and numerical analysis.
My path as a scientist started as an undergraduate at Duke University where I worked with the late Prof. Behringer and Abe Clark on impacts into granular media. There I was introduced to high-speed imaging which has become a fundamental tool for me as an experimentalist. My work in granular flows sparked an interest in fluid dynamics which I followed to the University of Minnesota where I completed my PhD with Filippo Coletti in 2020. During the course of my PhD, I worked with a team to design a turbulence box, meant to generate homogeneous turbulence over a large volume. With this setup, we could study the flow from the smallest turbulent length scales, the Kolmogorov scales, to the largest integral length scales, all while maintaining homogeneity in the flow greatly simplifying the complexity inherent in such a chaotic system. My experiments focused on the dynamics of particle-laden turbulence and I was interested in how the coupling between the air turbulence and the particles leads to all sorts of interesting (and beautiful) phenomena, like clustering, as well as dynamics like enhanced settling which has implications for meteorological models predicting snowfall in the atmosphere, among others. The connections to earth science in my fundamental research led me to study other multiphase turbulent flows with connections to our planet, like particle-laden plumes and after graduating, sand and snow transport by wind. The latter, specifically snow and sand saltation, I studied during a postdoc at ETH Zürich with Prof. Coletti between September 2020 and April 2022. There I collaborated with the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) to perform high-speed imaging experiments on sand particles in their wind tunnel. I also collaborated with Michi Lehning at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Davos, Switzerland where I used their wind tunnel to study the saltation of fresh snow falling in the Swiss Alps. Here at UC Irvine, I continue to find new ways to apply my interests and knowledge in fluid dynamics to environmental and planetary science through the work the Banerjee lab does on wildfires. I’m particularly interested in the coupled physics between the atmospheric boundary layer and wildfire as well as ember transport dynamics. As someone with a love for the outdoors, I’m excited to be performing field experiments around California on prescribed fires, which provide interesting and (relatively) safe opportunities to study wildfire physics.
Ph.D. Students:
Mukesh obtained his Master of Technology in Climate Science & Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) where he conducted simulations of extremely heavy rainfall events over the Indian subcontinent. He examined an optimal configuration of different parameterization schemes with the corresponding domain resolution using a non-hydrostatic mesoscale WRF model. He was a research intern at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) Pune before joining UCI and used IITM HPC and their operational forecast data from the Global Forecast Systems (GFST1534) for his experiments. He has a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) with honors in mechanical engineering with a focus on thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. His current research is focused on the understanding of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), turbulence, and modeling aspects of wildfires and surface layer parameterization schemes using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model.
Shu Li is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Irvine, under the supervision of Professor Tirtha Banerjee. She received her M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC, Irvine in 2020. Her research interests are natural hazard modeling and uncertainty analysis, with an emphasis on wildfire. She is committed to understand fire behaviors under complicated natural conditions, to simulate and predict the spread of wildfires using mathematical models and machine learning techniques, and to analyze the role of environmental and anthropogenic variables in wildfires. Her recent research activities include the early detection of wildfires using social sensing and satellite data, the analysis of the spatio-temporal patterns of wildfires in California, and the improvement of the wildfire-urban interface (WUI) mapping method.
Margarita Rivera
(Summer 2020 – present)
placeholder@uci.edu
Margarita finished her undergrad studies as a Renewable Energy Engineer in Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Mexico in 2017. Since then she worked in the solar energy field for two years before starting her M.s./Ph.D. studies at UCI in fall 2019. Her current research focuses on the understanding of fire break distribution, statistical analysis along networks at wildfire risk zones, and statistical modeling for wildfire occurrence and distribution.
Ajinkya Desai is an incoming Ph.D. student in the BLT Research Group. After graduating with his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kanpur, where he worked primarily in the field of computational fluid dynamics, he moved to the USA for his Master’s in Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. At UCSD, his work involved analyzing oceanographic field data to explore mechanisms of cross-shore transport in the inner-shelf off the coast of Point Loma. For the past few years, he has been working as an academic researcher at IIT Hyderabad in the field of nonlinear dynamics, with a focus on cross-flow-induced vibrations in heat-exchanger tubes. His current research includes the application of fluid mechanics and turbulence research to the simulation of wildfire behavior. Furthermore, he is also skilled at editing and proofreading scientific manuscripts for publication. His non-academic interests include dramatic arts, writing, and spirituality.
Subharthi Chowdhuri earned his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Jadavpur University (Calcutta, India) in 2009. After earning his bachelor’s, he moved to the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (Bangalore, India) as a junior research fellow, where he conducted research on magnetohydrodynamics. Later, in 2011, he joined as a scientist in the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (Pune, India), where he pursued research in atmospheric boundary layer flows. During his time at IITM (2011-2022), he developed a novel scaling approach to study the coherent structures in atmospheric turbulent flows and made progress towards the development of an “event-based framework” as an alternative to spectral modeling for wall-bounded turbulent flows. While employed at IITM, he completed his Masters in atmospheric science from the University of Pune during the period 2013-2017. In August 2022, he joined the Boundary layer and turbulence lab at UCI as a PhD student, where he plans to conduct his research on wall-bounded flows with a specific focus on atmospheric turbulence.
Past members:
Dr. Assaad Mrad (Postdoc, 2021)
Collaborators
Dr. Anirudh Rao.
Subharthi Chowdhuri, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, India.