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Meet Kat Smith

Kat

Kat is a computational oceanographer and climate scientist within the Climate, Ocean, and Sea-ice Modeling (COSIM) Team at LANL. She contributes developments to the physical and biogeochemical ocean components of the DOE’s Earth system model (Energy Exoscale Earth System Model, E3SM), investigates turbulent mixing, transport, and entrainment in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico, helps quantify the effects of climate change on marine sources of food security and offshore wind energy resources, and is interested in efficient and robust ways to alter the complexity of marine biogeochemical models.

Additionally, she dabbles in exploring how fuel structure and terrain affect prescribed wildfire burns. Prior to working at LANL, she was a postdoctoral researcher within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge working on understanding stratified ocean turbulence.

She received her PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder within the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Turbulence and Energy Systems Lab (TESLa) investigating non-linear interactions between upper ocean turbulence and climate relevant, reactive biogeochemical tracers such as CO2, phytoplankton, and nutrients.

Kat regularly works with large eddy simulations, global scale Earth system models, and both complex and reduced-order biogeochemical models.

Expertise

  • Turbulence modeling
  • Reactive flows,
  • Geophysical flows,
  • Biogeochemistry,
  • Reduced order modeling,
  • Large eddy simulations,
  • Earth system modeling,
  • Global carbon cycle,
  • Marine food security