Carl Ebeling

Carl is a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. There's a huge debate in the weather/climate/insurance/disaster mitigation communities whether global warming is increasing the frequency of hurricanes. However, the apparent increase in hurricanes post-1960 also coincides with the advent of weather satellites. Hence it's entirely possible that this increase is simply because now we also observe storms at sea, whereas before satellites we observed mainly only those that reached land. Carl is exploring this issue with a new approach: using seismometers to detect storms at sea. He has shown that this works well for powerful modern hurricanes, so the next step is to analyze older seismograms, which involves turning large volumes of analog records into densely sampled digital ones. Ebeling is also involved in several other projects related to tsunamigenic earthquakes.  One is a seismological assessment of large historical Hellenic Arc earthquakes from the perspective of regional tsunami hazard in the Mediterranean Sea (several of these earthquakes triggered locally-damaging tsunamis); the other improves an established discriminant to allow the identification of especially damaging tsunamis earlier than currently possible.