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Nick Pizzo

@nickpizzooceans.bsky.social
414 followers 82 following 98 posts

Asst. Prof. of Oceanography. Interested in fluid mechanics, waves, air-sea interaction, physics, geometry, applied math and the history of science. He/him. www.nickpizzooceans.com

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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 28/09/2026
These are what the clouds on Jupiter look up close. The small patches of white are cloud tops, soaring above the main, colourful cloud layer. Image from NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 38th close approach to Jupiter on 29 November 2021, processed by Kevin Gill (@kevinmgill.bsky.social)
A complex, swirling pattern of lighter and darker clouds. One large system, angled to the upper left in this scene, is a tawny brown colour and is elongate. Another, more circular storm system is at lower centre, and is a grey–greenish colour. The background swirls are various shades of grey to blue; small, white features dot the scene.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Worse surf than Hawaii? Sure. Bad? Not always: youtu.be/GJtfUJSzyZA?...
youtu.be
Surfing Iceland in CASTLES IN THE SKY (The Momentum Files)
YouTube video by The Momentum Files
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
This service you provide for the community has been tremendously useful -- thank you for doing this!
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
URI Graduate School of Oceanography @urigso.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The fall 2026 semester is officially underway🐏 🌊 💙 Happy first day of classes! We’re excited for another year of learning, research, and community on the URI Bay Campus. 🌊
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Meanwhile, here's nearly the opposite approach (rushing to publish so that one company gets credit over another), and a major announcement. 🧪🌊 mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1172335...
mathstodon.xyz
Terence Tao (@tao@mathstodon.xyz)
A remarkable achievement: Alpöge and Buckmaster have managed to push one of the major promising approaches towards constructing blowup solutions to fluid equations --- as developed by Cordoba and Mart...
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
"A reminder of the human artistry and tradition at the core of mathematics" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...
nytimes.com
The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice (Gift Article)
Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn.
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Carlos Moffat @carlosmoffat.com · 02/09/2026
🌊With the Fall semester upon us, it's time to start thinking about recruiting/applying to grad school for 2027. If you are a marine scientist looking for a graduate student, I've created a form where you can add your name and other info: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Please share widely! (1/2)
docs.google.com
Oceanography MS/PhD Positions for Fall 2027
This is an effort to collect the **contact information of potential advisors** for MS/PhD students in Oceanography. Please note that if you answer **you are agreeing to have your contact information...
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Greg Egan @gregegansf.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
“A mathematical question is much more than a theorem waiting to be proved; it is a source of momentum. First and foremost, it is a lighthouse in the night: it illuminates and guides mathematicians in their wanderings, both esthetic and scientific.” proofsandprompts.com/2026/08/30/c...
proofsandprompts.com
Care for a little more AI?
Hugo Duminil-Copin, Professor at Université de Genève and IHES Disclaimer. The effects of AI are vast, and there is much to be said about its broader impact on society. One should also remind that …
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Bill Minarik @silicatefondue.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
McGill Assistant Professor in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Oceanography & Earth Systems We seek candidates who will pursue research in physical oceanography with a strong modelling, observational and/or theoretical component. Review of applications begins 15 Oct. 2026. Questions addressed […]
fosstodon.org
Original post on fosstodon.org
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Really cool obs of KHI on the sun. Kelvin was interested in explaining how wind makes waves when he was studying this process 🌊. It turns out he was wrong for a subtle reason (a different instability dominates when the phase of the fluids changes). Some background: www.numdam.org/item/RHM_200...
numdam.org
Stability and instability in nineteenth-century fluid mechanics
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Langmuir won a Nobel in chemistry, while Bernard was awarded the Ig Nobel for his work debunking the myth that the amount of feathers a chicken lost in a tornado was related to its wind speed. 🧪🌊
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Bernard Vonnegut was a climate scientist who worked on cloud seeding in the same department as Irving Langmuir at GE. Langmuir first reported the upper ocean circulations that bear his name, and also inspired the character Felix Hoenikker in Cat's Cradle, written by Bernard's brother Kurt. 🧪🌊
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Dakota Smith @weatherdak.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
A firehose of smoke over the Northeast this evening. Just dreadful.
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Baylor Fox-Kemper @baylorfk.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
This one was really fun to do. Lots of new ideas discovered in there!
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Timothy Gowers @wtgowers.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...
openai.com
An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
An OpenAI model solved the 80-year-old unit distance problem, disproving a major conjecture in discrete geometry and marking a milestone in AI-driven mathematics.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
So cool! 🧪
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Simone Conradi @sconradi.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
A stunning visualization born from a collaboration with @manlius.bsky.social : 55,486 galaxies and 29,555 streamlines tracing how matter flows across our local universe, built on data from the CosmicFlows-4 project. Article in the first reply 👇
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Topographic Rossby wave lecture by the bay!
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
URI Graduate School of Oceanography @urigso.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
🌊 A team of researchers, including #URIGSO's @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social, has developed a new AI-powered way to study ocean currents. #GOFLOW uses thermal images from weather satellites already in orbit to map ocean surface currents in unprecedented detail, with no new hardware required. 🧪
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
There is a ton more to do on this to make it an operational product (clouds!), but it still is a step towards better constraining obs of these surface currents. Plus, geostationary satellites *presently* sample many parts of the globe!
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
You can also look at joint PDF of strain, vorticity and divergence. This again is a way to characterize certain features of the flow. At a practical level you can see how well we resolve the larger values here compared to AVISO (green line in first plot).
Joint PDFs of strain vs vorticity showing that thermal fronts generate a lot of the extremes in the distribution
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
This allows you to start computing things over ranges of scales only previous accessible in models. We are also interested in the gradients of the currents, as they have dynamical significance. Eg the horizontal divergence hints at the vertical motions, important for air-sea exchanges.
Currents, temperature gradients, current gradients.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
There is no geostrophic assumption here, which limits altimeters (and they also are more sensitive to hard-to-constrain internal wave contributions) and we are also not limited by sparse temporal sampling (eg SWOT has a repeat cycle that is ~21 days). This last point is the most significant.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Using a "relatively simple" (his words) U-Net trained on LLC4320 we sought to answer the following question: given temperature information at time t-1hr, t and t+1hr (so this is a conditional statement), can you predict the velocity fields at time t?
U-Net architecture.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
At this point we made the best decision of the project and reached out to my grad school friends, Roy Barkan and Kaushik Srinivasan. Kaushik has been talking to me about ML for at least a decade, and had been looking for a good data set to test some of his ideas on.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Great! We had both done lab work together and thought we could applying those techniques -- essentially correlating current features from one frame to another. It turns out doing this when you have a lot of interleaving structures (made clearer by plotting log grad T) is difficult.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Luc noticed if you downloaded the data and changed the color bar it'd look like this
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
We typically look at visible or IR goes products when path planning, eg this time we were doing experiments in the North Atlantic and were staring at windy. These satellites are amazing -- not only are they high res in space, but they sample every ~5 min. This high freq allows what follows.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
I was serving on a panel a few years ago and I saw I had a few missed calls from Luc. When I called him back he told me to check my email -- he had sent me a series of videos in which he'd changed the colorbar from the IR band of GOES and could vividly see thermal structure from the currents!
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
[Context: Larger scale ocean currents have weak vertical velocities. Smaller scale jets, fronts and eddies at the submesoscale (O(1) Ro # -- essentially .1-10km scale currents) supports vertical motions that are important for air-sea exchanges. But they are hard to measure (more on this later).]
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Our recent paper on using thermal imagery from geostationary satellites to infer surface currents was published! We call the method GOFLOW 🧪🌊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
There is a ton more to do on this to make it an operational product (clouds!), but it still is a step towards better constraining obs of these surface currents. Plus, geostationary satellites *presently* sample many parts of the globe!
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
You can also look at joint PDF of strain, vorticity and divergence. This again is a way to characterize certain features of the flow. At a practical level you can see how well we resolve the larger values here compared to AVISO (green line in first plot).
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
This allows you to start computing things over ranges of scales only previous accessible in models. We are also interested in the gradients of the currents, as they have dynamical significance. Eg the horizontal divergence hints at the vertical motions, important for air-sea exchanges.
100
Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
There is no geostrophic assumption here, which limits altimeters (and they also are more sensitive to hard-to-constrain internal wave contributions) and we are also not limited by sparse temporal sampling (eg SWOT has a repeat cycle that is ~21 days). This last point is the most significant.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Using a "relatively simple" (his words) U-Net trained on LLC4320 we sought to answer the following question: given temperature information at time t-1hr, t and t+1hr (so this is a conditional statement), can you predict the velocity fields at time t?
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
At this point we made the best decision of the project and reached out to grad school buddies of mine, Roy Barkan and Kaushik Srinivasan. Kaushik has been talking to me about ML for at least a decade, and had been looking for a good data set to test some of his ideas on.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Great, we thought! We had both done lab work together and thought we could applying those techniques -- essentially correlating current features from one frame to another. It turns out doing this when you have a lot of interleaving structures (made clearer by plotting log grad T) is difficult.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Luc noticed if you downloaded the data and changed the color bar it'd look like this
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
We typically look at visible or IR goes products when path planning, eg this time we were doing experiments in the North Atlantic and were staring at windy. These satellites are amazing -- not only are they high res in space, but they sample every ~5 min. This high freq allows what follows.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
I was serving on a panel a few years ago and I saw I had a few missed calls from Luc. When I called him back he told me to check my email -- he had sent me a series of videos in which he'd changed the colorbar from the IR band of GOES and could vividly see thermal structure from the currents!
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
[Context: Larger scale ocean currents have weak vertical velocities. Smaller scale jets, fronts and eddies at the submesoscale (O(1) Ro # -- essentially .1-10km scale currents) supports vertical motions that are important for air-sea exchanges. But they are a pain to measure (more on this later). ]
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Jaime Palter @jaimepalter.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Take a timeline cleanse to watch clam mating in action and the resulting clam babies. External fertilization is a hoot!
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Bubble rising through stratified flow, viewed w/ Schlieren
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
With Artemis in the news and space on the big screen: in case you haven't seen them, JPL has posted a series of incredible videos from some of their missions: e.g., youtu.be/1rVH0YlcKyY?... and www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykl5... 🔭🧪 No hollywood dramatization needed
youtu.be
JPL and the Space Age: The Pathfinders
YouTube video by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Baylor Fox-Kemper @baylorfk.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Work with me! Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University invites applications for a Doherty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ocean Sciences. This competitive postdoctoral fellowship will be awarded for a one-year period, + 2nd year possible. Please see apply.interfolio.com/183855!
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
John C. Baez @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
I'm only now learning about "vector meson dominance", a big idea put forth by Sakurai and others around 1960. Just as the pion comes in +, - and neutral forms and has spin 0, the rho meson comes in +, - and neutral forms and has spin 1 - so it's described by a "vector", like the photon. (1/n)
Chart of the nonet of vector mesons: a hexagon with 3 mesons at center, for a total of 9.
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Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Cambridge University Press - Science & Engineering @cambup-scieng.cambridge.org · 13/03/2026
New Volume of Journal of Fluid Mechanics available on Cambridge Core cup.org/4dfo2TW New Volume = New Cover 📸 (A16) Bouncing to coalescence transition for droplet impact onto moving liquid pools Harris, D.M. et al. doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2026.11232
Cover of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Volume 1030, dated 10 March 2026. The image shows multiple droplets creating ripples on a liquid surface. The publication is by Cambridge University Press.
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Nick Pizzo @nickpizzooceans.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Improvements!
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