UMass Dartmouth Prof. Amit Tandon (College of Engineering/SMAST) is leading a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the United States and India to support large-scale research on monsoon prediction.
Researchers from the two countries are working together to understand ocean processes in the international waters of the Bay of Bengal and their relation to the annual monsoon, which is a dominant factor in the lives of the population of the Indian subcontinent.
The Office of Naval Research is funding the participating U.S. scientists and contributing the resources of the R/V Roger Revelle. The ship made a call in the port of Chennai in mid-June, the first U.S. research vessel to call at an Indian port since the 1980s, and has since completed its first successful data-gathering cruise in the Bay of Bengal.
The bilateral team also includes Dr. Amala Mahadevan, WHOI senior scientist and SMAST adjunct faculty, Dr. Sanjiv Ramachandran, research associate in Tandon’s Upper Ocean Dynamics Lab, and scientists from 17 other U.S. and Indian institutions.
As part of the collaboration, Dr. Tandon and several U.S. colleagues have returned to India to conduct a two-week training workshop at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore on upper-ocean dynamics in the Bay of Bengal. Read full press release.
Photo: Amit Tandon welcomes scientists aboard the R/V Roger Revelle in Chennai, India, as co-chief scientist Dr. Emily Shroyer from Oregon State University looks on.
Ten senior undergraduate students from the Indian Institute of Technology, the country’s premier institution of higher education in engineering, are deepening their research experience at UMass Dartmouth this summer. Over a two-month internship, each “visiting research student” tackles a research problem defined jointly with an advisor from SMAST or an engineering discipline. On July 11, the interns will present their research results at a closing event.