The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 through Nov. 30, bringing with it an increased focus on these destructive storms.

Florida State University faculty are world leaders in the study of hurricanes and efforts to mitigate their impact. Faculty are available to answer questions and provide perspective for news stories throughout hurricane season and beyond.

Four faculty also participated in a virtual media briefing about this year’s hurricane season.

FORECASTING, FORMATION AND TRACKING
Mark Bourassa, professor, Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, and associate director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies
mbourassa@fsu.edu, (850) 644-6923
Bourassa uses on-site and remote (aircraft and satellite-based) observations as well as meteorological models to research air-sea interactions and how satellites measure what is happening on Earth’s surface. He is an expert on the network of global meteorological and oceanographic observations that inform forecasts, and the identification of tropical disturbances, which are possible precursors to tropical cyclones. Bourassa is also a team leader for the NASA Ocean Vector Wind Science Team.

Bradford D. Johnson, assistant professor, Department of Geography, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy
bdjohnson@fsu.edu
Johnson’s expertise spans tropical cyclone forecasting, hazard interpretation and science communication. His research integrates geospatial analytics, numerical weather prediction and artificial intelligence to assess the atmospheric and societal impacts of extreme weather events, with an emphasis on urban areas and land use change. He leads projects examining public responses to hurricane forecast graphics and works to improve communication of risk using plain language for diverse stakeholders, including policymakers, emergency managers and the public. His interdisciplinary background and federal program leadership experience position him as a valuable resource for interpreting tropical cyclone hazards and their broader implications.

David Zierden, state climatologist; associate in research, Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies
dzierden@coaps.fsu.edu, (850) 644-3417
Zierden’s research focuses on climate variability in Florida, the factors that go into seasonal hurricane forecasts and the large-scale environmental factors that affect the hurricane season, including the El Niño/La Niña cycle. He studies how forecasting can be applied to industries including agriculture, forestry and water resources.

COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
Pedro L. Fernández-Cabán, assistant professor, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response (RIDER) Center
plfernandez@eng.famu.fsu.edu, (850) 410-6251
Fernández-Cabán’s research couples laboratory and field experiments to assess the structural performance of civil infrastructure during windstorm events. His recent work focuses on developing state-of-the-art machine learning models to predict hurricane wind fields and their interaction with coastal landscapes. Fernández-Cabán’s research leverages ground-level anemometric datasets collected during landfalling hurricanes and advanced wind tunnel techniques to better model the impact of coastal storms on civil infrastructure.

Katie Kehoe, assistant professor, College of Fine Arts
mkk22f@fsu.edu
Kehoe primarily works in performance and site-specific installations with a focus on natural disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. She led a 2024 project that honored the resilience of the rural Florida community of Steinhatchee in the aftermath of hurricanes Idalia and Debby. The project, “Learning from Local Experience to Strengthen Disaster Resilience,” was part of a pilot research initiative that examines how rural communities recover from extreme weather events such as hurricanes.

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
David Merrick, director of the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Program; director of the Center for Disaster Risk Policy
dmerrick@fsu.edu, Office: (850) 644-9961, Cell: (850) 980-7098
Merrick has worked in state emergency management for more than 21 years in roles including planning, external affairs and air operations. He developed and oversees the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Program’s Disaster Incident Research Team, which deploys to disaster impact areas to perform field research on disaster and emergency management. This team has deployed to disasters such as hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Michael, Ian, and Helene to support federal, state and local agencies. His research interests include emergency management planning and policy, remote sensing and unmanned aircraft systems, and information technology in emergency management.

ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
Shi-Ling Hsu, D’Alemberte Professor, College of Law
shsu@law.fsu.edu, (850) 644-0726
Hsu is an expert in the areas of environmental and natural resource law, economics and property. He has published in a variety of legal journals, co-authored the casebook Ocean and Coastal Resources Law and has appeared on the American Public Media radio show “Marketplace.” Before entering academia, he was a senior attorney and economist for the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, D.C.

Erin Ryan, Elizabeth C. and Clyde W. Atkinson Professor and associate dean for Environmental Programs, College of Law
eryan@law.fsu.edu, (850) 645-0072
Ryan specializes in environmental governance and environmental, water, property and land use law and oversees the Center for Environmental, Energy, and Land Use Law at the FSU College of Law. She has appeared in the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, London Financial Times, National Public Radio, Thomson-Reuters Beijing and local NBC and CBS Television News.

EVACUATION
Eren Ozguven, associate professor, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, director of the Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response (RIDER) Center
eozguven@eng.famu.fsu.edu, (850) 410-6146
Ozguven directs the Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response Center, which improves the quality of life in Florida and the Southeast by identifying disaster vulnerability, improving infrastructure and investigating ways to minimize negative impacts of natural disasters. His research interests include transportation accessibility, modeling of emergency evacuation operations, artificial intelligence and the simulation of transportation networks. Recent scholarship focuses on the relationships among different infrastructure networks in Florida and how that contributes to disaster preparation.

Maxim A. Dulebenets, associate professor and graduate program director, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
mdulebenets@eng.famu.fsu.edu, (850) 410-6621
Dulebenets’ research mainly focuses on operations  and optimization. His research group has developed efficient algorithms that can be used to schedule large-scale evacuations in preparation for major natural hazards. His models capture realistic features of emergency evacuation planning, including potential impacts of evacuation settings on evacuees themselves. His recent studies propose new types of optimization models and solution algorithms for emergency evacuation planning under pandemic settings, considering a higher risk of virus spread in overcrowded emergency shelters.

RISK AND INSURANCE
Patricia Born, Payne H. & Charlotte Hodges Midyette Eminent Scholar in Risk Management & Insurance, College of Business
pborn@business.fsu.edu, (850) 644-7884
Born studies the insurance market structure and performance, professional liability, health insurance and the management of catastrophic risks, such as hurricanes and other natural disasters. She is a past president of the American Risk and Insurance Association and the Risk Theory Society.

Charles Nyce, Dr. William T. Hold Professor of Risk Management and Insurance and chair of the Risk Management/Insurance, Real Estate & Legal Studies Department, College of Business
cnyce@business.fsu.edu, (850) 645-8392
Nyce’s research focuses on catastrophic risk financing. He has written numerous articles on risk management and insurance topics, including title insurance, enterprise risk management, predictive analytics and natural hazards.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Chris Uejio, professor, Department of Geography, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy
cuejio@fsu.edu
Uejio studies how the physical environment influences human health and well-being. His recent research includes investigations of tropical cyclones, extreme heat and health. Uejio has been quoted in the Orlando Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, Wall Street Journal, Science Friday and other news outlets about public health issues, including heat waves and hurricanes.

URBAN PLANNING
Dennis Smith, planner in residence, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, College of Social Sciences and Public Policy
djsmith3@fsu.edu
Smith is the director of the Mark & Marianne Barnebey Planning & Development Lab, which uses the academic and professional resources of Florida State University to connect with public and private partners to provide capacity and innovative planning for the sustainable growth and long-term viability of Florida communities. His work has focused on risks to the built environment, including projects for resiliency, transportation modeling, evacuation planning for high-risk areas and vulnerability assessment. He has extensive experience managing state and federal programs and a thorough knowledge of laws relating to land use, transportation and disaster recovery.

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Florida State University has awarded two outstanding scientists with the Distinguished University Scholar Award in recognition of their long-standing track records of research.

“Our specialized faculty lead major programs, train the next generation of scholars and provide a level of expertise that is often difficult to find,” said Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson. “Their hard work and diligence are a big part of FSU’s success. It’s an honor to recognize their contributions with the Distinguished University Scholar Award.”

Recipients received a one-time award of $10,000 and are entitled to use the title Distinguished University Scholar throughout their employment at FSU. The award specifically recognizes non-tenure track faculty members who are solely dedicated to either teaching or research activities.

This year’s recipients are:

Xiaobiao Xu, Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies

Xiaobiao Xu is a senior research scientist at the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies who used high-resolution numerical models to understand large-scale ocean circulation and its effect on the climate.  He has received funding from a variety of sources including the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Office of Naval Research.  He received his doctoral degree from the University of Miami in 2006 and joined Florida State University in 2012.

Jan Jaroszynski, National High Magnetic Field Laboratory

Jan Jarosynski holds the rank of Research Faculty III at the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Jarosynski is an accomplished researcher in the areas of condensed matter physics, material science and scientific instrumentation development. In particular, he invented a high torque magnetometer that is used by scientists to characterize and understand the behavior of a type of conductor in high-magnetic fields across a wide range of temperatures and angles. He received his doctorate in physics from the Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and joined the MagLab in 2000.

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Record-breaking high temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean combined with El Niño spell uncertainty for the Atlantic hurricane season. 

El Niño, known to reduce hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin, developed early this summer.  

With the conflicting factors of El Nino in the Pacific leading to fewer hurricanes and warm Atlantic Ocean temperatures favoring hurricane development, seasonal forecasts are for near-normal activity with lower confidence than other years.

Around Florida, coastal ocean temperatures have risen to the mid-90s for some parts of the Florida Keys and the southwest part of the state.  

In addition to threatening coral reefs, seagrass and other critical components of the ecosystem, warmer coastal waters provide heat and moisture that can fuel hurricane intensity.  

David Zierden is a research associate at Florida State University’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies and serves as Florida’s state climatologist. He is available to speak to the media about El Niño, extreme temperatures and their impacts. 

David Zierden, research associate, FSU Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies; state climatologist at the Florida Climate Center 

(850) 644-3417; dzierden@fsu.edu 

Zierden studies climate variability and how it affects agriculture, forestry, water and other industries and resources in the state. He has testified before a congressional committee about predicting and monitoring El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and its impacts. 

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Florida State University researchers have analyzed the carbon exported from surface waters of the California Current Ecosystem — the first-ever study to quantify the total carbon sequestration for a region of the ocean.

The study, published in Nature Communications, serves as a framework for assessing how the processes that sequester carbon might change in a warmer world, while also creating a blueprint for similar budgets in other ocean regions.

Understanding the carbon cycle — the sources and reservoirs of carbon — is an important focus of Earth sciences. Many studies have examined the carbon sequestered by sinking particles formed from algal production. Fewer studies have focused on plankton particles that move to the deep ocean through other methods or the marine life that migrates vertically through layers of the ocean.

“Our study is the first to put all of these different processes together to fully investigate the processes driving the biological carbon pump for a major ocean region,” said lead author Michael Stukel, an associate professor in FSU’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science.

Stukel and his team found that a host of processes contribute to the movement of organic carbon through the marine ecosystem. Their analysis confirmed that sinking particles are the dominant process transporting carbon, but they also found that particles transported by ocean currents and zooplankton that migrate down into the deep ocean every day contribute 30 to 40 percent of carbon sequestered in the deep ocean.

The data comes from 15 years of research cruises by the California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological Research program in an area that spans from San Diego to Monterey Bay and extends about 300 miles offshore. Stukel and his team combined information collected during those trips with computer modeling.

The algae in the surface ocean perform about half the world’s photosynthesis, but they live for a week, so the carbon dioxide they take in only gets sequestered if the carbon created by plankton somehow moves into the deep ocean, a process known as the biological carbon pump.

That process transports five to twelve petagrams of carbon into the deep ocean every year. For perspective, humans emit about ten petagrams of carbon annually.

As climate change alters the Earth, it’s unclear how it might affect processes like the biological carbon pump.

“We don’t know if the biological carbon pump will take up more or less carbon dioxide in the future,” Stukel said. “The first step in answering that question is putting together a full budget for what’s happening now. We think our study is an important step in the process of fully understanding how the biological carbon pump works today and hence, how it will change in the future.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Co-authors were John P. Irving, Christian K. Fender and Natalia Yingling, all from Florida State University; Thomas B. Kelly, an FSU doctoral graduate who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks; and Mark D. Ohman from the University of California San Diego.

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