Researcher Spotlight - Meet Prof. Dr. Friederike Pollmann: Advancing Ocean Mixing Parameterizations

Earlier this summer, she started a cooperation professorship between AWI and University of Hamburg on Waves and Mixing Processes in the Polar Oceans. In this interview, she reflects on what motivates her in this field, emphasizing both the complexity of the internal waves' life cycle and the existing knowledge base, which allows the construction of energy-constrained parameterizations of wave-driven mixing for climate models.

What is your current scientific affiliation within the TRR 181 and your institutional affiliation?

”I have done more or less the full TRR journey: I started out as a postdoc in subproject S2 in the TRR’s first phase and have been a PI since the second. I have been involved the subprojects W4, T3, L5, S3 and also in the RTG board, but not all of them at the same time. I have an Emmy-Noether group at Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) on internal waves and mixing in the warming Arctic and earlier this summer have started a cooperation professorship between AWI and University of Hamburg.”

What motivates you to work in this field? 

“Different things at different times. One aspect that I like is that there is so much left to discover about internal waves and their pretty complicated life cycle, but that at the same time there is a sufficiently robust knowledge base to build and apply an energy-constrained parameterization of wave-driven mixing that takes the entire internal wave life cycle into account.”

How has your background and career path shaped your approach to climate science?

“My education had a relatively strong focus on theory and numerical modelling. I started out with geophysics and then did a combined program in atmospheric sciences, oceanography and climate, so my background and therefore my approach to climate sciences is probably a bit broader than it would have been with a focus solely on oceanography.”

What are your primary research interests? 

“A key research focus of mine is on oceanic internal gravity waves. I work on describing their generation at rough seafloor topography, on extracting their spectral shape and the mixing they induce from observations, and on describing their effects in ocean models. My Emmy-Noether project added a new regional focus on the Arctic and the complications that arise when there’s also sea ice. A central aim is to unravel the role of wave-driven mixing for Arctic sea ice decline and how this impacts ocean and climate dynamics within the Arctic and beyond.”

What do you believe are the most pressing challenges in climate science today, and how does your work contribute to addressing them?

“From a scientific perspective, one key challenge still is to represent unresolved processes in general circulation models in a physics-based manner. This is an aspect many subprojects in the TRR 181 work on and my research also contributes to solving this problem. By improving how wave-driven mixing is represented in climate models, my work helps models simulate the ocean more realistically, especially in regions like the Arctic. From a more general perspective, I think it is very challenging that in many political debates climate change seems to be a topic for economically stable times only and is ignored as soon as challenges in other areas of society arise. I worry about political efforts that weaken scientific research and destroy public trust in all scientific disciplines.”

How does collaboration across different institutions and disciplines enhance the impact of your research?

“Looking at methods, approaches and problems outside of my own ‘bubble’ certainly is a source of creativity for me and helps me to tackle my own scientific problems from more diverse perspectives, which can lead to unexpected new ideas or solutions. Being connected to both AWI and University of Hamburg allows me to do exactly that and I really appreciate that I can interact and collaborate with scientist from so many different fields of research.” 

What advice would you give to students or young researchers interested in pursuing a career in climate sciences?

“From my obviously subjective and biased perspective, I have come to appreciate, over time, the sometimes pretty tedious basic math and physics lectures and the occasionally immensely frustrating programming classes, which I certainly didn’t always appreciate in the moment that I had to take them. A lot of problems in climate sciences, at least from my angle of research, are tackled using equations and numerical models and this training has proven very helpful. Although … I’m confident to say that beyond these classes I never have and likely never will use Fortran and pgplot for scientific figure creation.”