Kemal Cambazoglu

Background and research interests

Dr Cambazoglu is an early-career researcher working in the field of physical oceanography and coastal engineering. His main research interests are numerical modeling of coastal ocean and nearshore environments in order to understand physical processes and to improve the predictive capabilities of forecast models.

He received a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2009. During the PhD studies, he worked with Dr. Kevin Haas on numerical modeling of nearshore hydrodynamics and sediment transport on barred beaches using a coupled wave-circulation-morphodynamic model. His research particularly focused on enhancing the breaking-wave mechanism of the model to improve hydrodynamics predictions for applications on non‐monotonic topography.

Cambazoglu joined Department of Marine Science at University of Southern Mississippi in 2009 and has been collaborating with Dr. Cheryl Ann Blain at the Naval Research Laboratory since then. His current research activities are on 3D barotropic and baroclinic modeling of near‐coastal environments such as sea‐straits, estuaries and bays using coupled ocean‐atmosphere model systems. He is interested in coastal data assimilation to improve predictability of coastal processes and properties such as circulation, upwelling, tides, currents, temperature and salinity.

He has also extensively used the Advanced Circulation Model, ADCIRC, widely used for storm surge and inundation0-related applications, and also the Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System, COAMPS, which is used operationally by the US Navy. He has been working on the application of a multi-scale coupled model system of ADCIRC, COAMPS and HYCOM (Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model) to the Turkish Straits System to model the complex two-layer flow dynamics of the system by ADCIRC. He has also worked on developing the coupling of ADCIRC with COAMPS and NCOM (Navy Coastal Ocean Model) for an application to the Chesapeake Bay Area in order to study the dynamics around the Chesapeake Bay mouth area such as tidal water levels and currents

Other research interests include unstructured mesh generation and improvement, assessment of the impact of resolution on atmospheric forcing products by COAMPS, assessment of tidal energy potential in coastal areas, coupled longshore and cross-shore modeling of beach evolution.