Sebastian Ortega started his graduate degree in Fall 2011. His line of research is focuses on Tropical Meteorology with Dr. Peter Webster. Specifically, he studies the South Asia Monsoon, and is interested both in its intra-seasonal and intra-annual variability. Within the research group, they study closely what happens in the upper troposphere as well as in the lower troposphere, and try to understand how both might interact. They have recently submitted a paper to the Journal of Climate, where they show that quasi-biweekly oscillation over the monsoon regions occur simultaneously with quasi-biweekly oscillations of the monsoon anticyclone.

Sebastian is a Civil Engineer from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellin. He says that his Colombian university also has a very good Geophysics School, focusing mostly in Hydrology, this is where he became interested in Earth Sciences. In his senior year of undergrad, he worked in Physical Limnology and studied how rivers can affect the thermal stratification of reservoirs. He is also very interested in Physics and Dynamical systems. Sebastian did his Ph.D. minor in Physics and always tries to incorporate what he’s learned here into research. In his spare time, Sebastian enjoys playing guitar, rock climbing, and reading.