Anirban Guha
Current Position:
Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of British Columbia, Canada
Education:
Ph.D. The University of British Columbia, Canada.
M.A.Sc. University of Windsor, Canada.
B.M.E. Jadavpur University, India.
Links: C.V., Ph.D. Thesis
About me: I finished my Ph.D. in May 2013 from the University of British Columbia. At UBC, I worked in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics group under the supervision of Prof. Greg Lawrence, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Fluid Mechanics. I was also affiliated with the Institute of Applied Mathematics. I will be visiting DAMTP, University of Cambridge as a David Crighton fellow during the summer of 2013. There I will be working with Prof. Peter Haynes on stratospheric polar vortices. In October/November 2013 I will be joining the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department of UCLA as a Postdoc, and will be working under the mentorship of Prof. Carlos Mechoso. At UCLA, I will be studying Rossby wave breaking in the stratospheric vortex.
Research Interests: I am broadly interested in problems pertaining to physical oceanography and atmospheric physics. Specifically, I am interested in (i) wave mechanics, (ii) hydrodynamic instability and turbulence, (iii) chaos and bifurcation, (iv) vortex dynamics, (v) buoyancy driven flows.
My aim is to understand different physical phenomena pertaining to natural flows, be it estuaries, oceans or planetary atmospheres. While some of these flow processes involve motions smaller than a few millimetres, motions bigger than the size of our earth are also not uncommon. Looking at the great diversity in natural flow processes, we might conclude that they are all very different. Quite surprisingly, there exists an underlying mathematical connection, which I try to exploit in my research. Needless to say, the mathematics is not any less complicated than its physical manifestation.
I try to investigate the underlying mechanisms that drive a given natural flow process. My first step is to simplify the problem (this is essential since the big picture is often blurred by too much information) so that I can take a theoretical approach, at least up to a certain extent. This enables me to describe what’s happening mathematically, and interpret the results physically. Although this approach is based on a good deal of idealizations/assumptions/approximations (and therefore its practical relevance can be questioned), it still provides valuable “noise-free” information.
Natural flows are actually a combination of multiple processes, and these processes often interact with each other. Thus studying each process in isolation might not be very realistic. My long term goal is to understand how different mechanisms interact with each other (for example, interaction between internal waves and vortical flows). This bottom-up approach, I believe, will better enable us to frame the big picture than the conventional top-down approach of CFD based research.
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