Dr. Kriti Bhargava joined UCAR/JCSDA in February 2021 and will be working with the Sea ice Ocean Coupled Data Assimilation (SOCA) project that aims at developing marine data assimilation (DA) systems within the Joint Effort for Data Assimilation Integration (JEDI). She will be mainly working on the development of high-resolution regional ocean data assimilation in the context of hurricane forecasting with special focus on the implementation of the MOM6 interface to the regional North Atlantic domain of NOAA’s Hurricane Analysis Forecast System (HAFS). She will be based in the NOAA-NCWCP building in College Park, MD that is, post-COVID.

Dr. Bhargava earned her PhD and MS in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park. For her PhD, she implemented an adaptive online scheme to estimate and correct systematic errors that could be used with the operational scale global models. She tested this technique using the NCEP’s operational Global Forecast System (GFS). During and after her PhD, her research interests included strongly coupled data assimilation. After that she worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the UMD, extending her methods to the ocean-atmosphere coupled system using the weakly coupled Climate Forecasting System. At UMD, she also collaborated with the Indian Monsoon Mission and investigated the impact of assimilating surface observation in the CFS system.

Kriti is from India where she earned her Bachelor’s degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) in Civil Engineering, with a minor in Energy Sciences. She is actively involved in alumni student mentorship programs, mentoring graduate students at UMD and undergraduate students at IIT-B. In her leisure time, Kriti enjoys hiking, camping, traveling, painting (especially acrylics), and baking/cooking.