Professor Emeritus

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villy kourafalou

Vassiliki H. Kourafalou
Professor Emerita

Email: vkourafalou@miami.edu
Phone: (305) 421-4905

Villy Kourafalou is a Research Professor at the Department of Ocean Sciences in the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. She is an expert in coastal dynamics, extending to the shelf break processes and interaction with oceanic flows. 
Kourafalou has taught courses on Coastal Oceanography and advises graduate students on coastal and shelf processes, river plume dynamics, numerical modeling, and ocean prediction.

Research: Current research in Kourafalou’s group focuses on the science needed to advance the understanding, modeling, and prediction of the interdisciplinary dynamics in the coastal ocean and regional seas. Applications include transport and fate of coastal waters carrying sediments, nutrients and pollutants; ocean feedback to tropical storms and hurricanes; design of new and optimization of existing ocean observing systems. The focus is on coastal to large-scale exchanges, toward the study of seamless ocean systems, from the deep to the shelf and coastal scales.

Rana Fine
Rana Arnold Fine
Professor Emerita

Faculty Profile: https://people.miami.edu/profile/rfine@miami.edu
Email: rfine@miami.edu
Phone: (305) 421-4722

Research: My research focuses on how natural and anthropogenic climate change affects ocean ventilation, which is ocean uptake of atmospheric gases such as oxygen and CO2. It is known that a warming ocean will take up less atmospheric gas and increase ocean stratification, which will decrease mixing. However, there are natural processes that can counter balance the anthropogenic warming trends. We are finding that in some parts of the ocean oxygen uptake and storage are decreasing and in other parts they are increasing. One of the best ways to assess and understand the reasons for these changes in ventilation is to use chemical tracers in the ocean. For decades, we have been measuring and analyzing tracers throughout the global ocean - such as the anthropogenic gases of chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, and sulfur hexafluoride, SF6. The tracers serve as a dye with which to follow ocean circulation pathways. Another advantage of using these tracers is the added dimension of time; their time history is fairly well known, they are an integrating quantity and an analog for oceanic anthropogenic CO2 uptake, and they provide an independent test for time integration of models. Our research has been focusing on ocean ventilation in the deep meridional overturning circulation and the shallow subtropical-tropical waters.

frank millero
Frank Millero
Professor Emeritus

Faculty Profile: https://people.miami.edu/profile/f.millero@miami.edu
Email: f.millero@miami.edu
Phone: (305) 421-4707

Research: My major research interests are in the application of physical chemical principles to natural waters. I attempt to understand how ionic interactions affect the thermodynamics and kinetics of processes occurring in the oceans. Ionic interaction models are used to estimate the activity and speciation of ions in natural waters of known composition....

peter minnett
Peter Minnett
Professor Emeritus

Faculty Profile: https://people.miami.edu/profile/pminnett@miami.edu
Email: pminnett@miami.edu
Phone: (305) 421-4104

Research: Peter Minnett is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ocean Sciences at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, University of Miami. His research is primarily concentrated on satellite remote sensing of the sea surface (especially in the infrared), microscale effects occurring at the sea surface, diurnal heating of the upper ocean.

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