Dr. Hyodae Seo

I have earned my B.S. degree in Atmospheric Sciences in 2002 from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. Then I studied coupled ocean-atmosphere interactions under the guidance of Dr. Art Miller (oceanographer) and Dr. John Roads (meteorologist, deceased) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego and received a Ph.D. in 2007. In addition to my Ph.D. advisors, I am grateful to two of my research mentors and friends, Prof. Ragu Murtugudde (Univ. Maryland) and Prof. Markus Jochum (NCAR, now at Copenhagen University) for their guidance and continued support.

As a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I received the 2006 NCAR Advanced Study Program (ASP) Graduate Student Visiting Fellowship, which allowed me to visit NCAR for 3 months. In 2006, I am also a recipient of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Frieman Director’s Prize for Excellence in Graduate Student Research in 2006 (see here). After my Ph.D. and before the beginning of my formal postdoctoral appointment, I have spent 6 months as a visiting postdoc at IPRC/University of Hawaii, working with Prof. Niklas Schneider. I also attended the Physical Oceanography Dissertation Symposium (PODS) V in Honolulu, in 2008. From 2008 to 2009,  I was awarded the NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, which allowed me to work at UCLA with Prof. Roberto Mechoso and at IPRC/University of Hawaii with Prof. Shang-Ping Xie. In 2010, I became a visiting assistant researcher at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, before I joined the WHOI as the tenure-track Assistant Scientist position in 2010 under the institution-wide initiative in climate research and have been promoted to Associate Scientist in 2014. I recently received the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award which supports my theoretical and numerical investigation of the air-sea interactions in the Indian Ocean.

I am a climate scientist and numerical modeler, with a broad range of research and teaching interests in oceanic and atmospheric processes and their interactions relating to climate. My focus has been particularly on “regional-scale” climate dynamics and small-scale and multi-scale scale Earth-System interactions across the atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice. Regional climate studies inherently cross many boundaries across academic disciplines with far-reaching socio-economic implications, and this cross-disciplinary nature of the problem and the practical importance to human society is what has fascinated me about this research topic. The overall goal of my research is to better understand the climate processes and their variability and changes at regional to local scales and to deliver useful and usable predictions and projections to adapt to and mitigate climate change impacts.

These interests are pursued using numerical model simulations of the ocean and the atmosphere, theory of the geophysical fluid dynamics, and the extensive use of satellite and in situ data and global climate model outputs. I am the developer of the Scripps Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Regional (SCOAR) model, which is one of the first and perhaps the most widely used regional coupled models for climate study. For more information, please see the list of my current projects and CV.