Milan Curcic

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Milan Curcic Milan Curcic

Welcome to my page!

I'm a Serbian-American scientist & author. Currently I hold a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor of Ocean Sciences at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Sciences and a Core Faculty at the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing.

I study ocean surface waves and their role in atmosphere and ocean surface boundary layers using theory, measurements, and numerical modeling. My PhD dissertation (2015) was the first formulation of momentum-conserving wind-wave-current coupling. You can find my academic group's GitHub page here. I currently advise two PhD students, Susan Harrison (started Fall 2024) and Stephen Casey (started Spring 2025). In 2025, I advised a postdoctoral associate Chong Jia.

My work is mainly funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. I'm also a recent recipient of an NSF CAREER award to study wave tearing in hurricanes.

I currently have a fully funded opening for a PhD student to lead research on measuring and modeling the tearing of steep waves by strong wind. Email me if you're interested.

Previously, I co-founded Cloudrun (a weather prediction SaaS), Fortran-lang (an open-source software community), and Henet (an ocean wave measurement technology).

I live in Boca Raton, FL, and am a proud dad of two boys, Nolan (6 years old) and Liam (deceased at birth on August 9, 2022).

Please email me if you think I can help with anything!

Books

Cover of Modern Fortran: Building Efficient Parallel Applications Cover of Fluid Mechanics for Atmosphere and Ocean Scientists

Papers

  1. Detelich et al. (2026). “Modeling the Seasonality of Wind-Driven Hydrocarbon Waves in Titan's Polar Lakes.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
  2. Schneck et al. (2026). “Modeling Wind-Driven Waves on Other Planets: Applications to Mars, Titan, and Exoplanets.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
  3. Ribal et al. (2026). “Global wave model performance in the vicinity of the Monterey Bay, California.” Ocean Modelling.
  4. Vinci et al. (2026). “Refractivity Estimation Using a Phase-Coherent Vertical Array.” IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.
  5. Jia & Curcic (2025). “Ocean Wave Slope Effects on Global Air-Sea Turbulent Heat Flux.” Geophysical Research Letters.
  6. Shi et al. (2025). “Sea Surface Roughness Estimation Using a UAV.” IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.
  7. Ortiz-Suslow et al. (2025). “Accounting for Ocean Waves and Current Shear in Wind Stress Parameterization.” Boundary-Layer Meteorology.
  8. Curcic (2025). “Revisiting the hydrodynamic modulation of short surface waves by longer waves.” Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
  9. Lyu et al. (2025). “Reduction of air-sea momentum flux due to whitecap residual foam observed during a laboratory experiment.” Scientific Reports.
  10. Benbow et al. (2025). “Fair-Weather Nearshore Surface Winds: Observational Insights and Gaussian Process Regression Analysis.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  11. Tan et al. (2025). “Wind-Wave Momentum Flux in Steep, Strongly Forced, Surface Gravity Wave Conditions.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  12. Elipot et al. (2024). “Clouddrift: a Python package to accelerate the use of Lagrangian data for atmospheric, oceanic, and climate sciences.” Journal of Open Source Software.
  13. Tan et al. (2023). “Laboratory Wave and Stress Measurements Quantify the Aerodynamic Sheltering in Extreme Winds.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  14. Hlywiak et al. (2023). “Evaluating Atmospheric Surface Layer Flux Parameterization within the Coastal Regime.” Monthly Weather Review.
  15. Kedward et al. (2022). “The State of Fortran.” Computing in Science & Engineering.
  16. Dobbelaere et al. (2022). “Impacts of Hurricane Irma (2017) on wave-induced ocean transport processes.” Ocean Modelling.
  17. Wang et al. (2021). “Propagating Mechanisms of the 2016 Summer BSISO Event: Air-Sea Coupling, Vorticity, and Moisture.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
  18. Ott et al. (2020). “A Fortran-Keras Deep Learning Bridge for Scientific Computing.” Scientific Programming.
  19. Curcic & Haus (2020). “Revised estimates of ocean surface drag in strong winds.” Geophysical Research Letters.
  20. Haza et al. (2019). “Wind-Based Estimations of Ocean Surface Currents From Massive Clusters of Drifters in the Gulf of Mexico.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  21. Curcic (2019). “A parallel Fortran framework for neural networks and deep learning.” ACM SIGPLAN Fortran Forum.
  22. Li et al. (2019). “Uncertainty Propagation in Coupled Atmosphere-Wave-Ocean Prediction System: A Study of Hurricane Earl (2010).” Monthly Weather Review.
  23. Carlson et al. (2018). “Surface Ocean Dispersion Observations From the Ship-Tethered Aerostat Remote Sensing System.” Frontiers in Marine Science.
  24. Haza et al. (2018). “Drogue-Loss Detection for Surface Drifters during the Lagrangian Submesoscale Experiment (LASER).” Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology.
  25. Dietrich et al. (2018). “Sensitivity of Storm Surge Predictions to Atmospheric Forcing during Hurricane Isaac.” Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering.
  26. Laxague et al. (2017). “Gravity-Capillary Wave Spectral Modulation by Gravity Waves.” IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
  27. Lindo-Atichati et al. (2016). “Description of surface transport in the region of the Belizean Barrier Reef based on observations and alternative high-resolution models.” Ocean Modelling.
  28. Mariano et al. (2016). “Statistical properties of the surface velocity field in the northern Gulf of Mexico sampled by GLAD drifters.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  29. Chen & Curcic (2016). “Ocean surface waves in Hurricane Ike (2008) and Superstorm Sandy (2012): Coupled model predictions and observations.” Ocean Modelling.
  30. Judt et al. (2016). “Atmospheric forcing of the upper ocean transport in the Gulf of Mexico: From seasonal to diurnal scales.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  31. Curcic et al. (2016). “Hurricane-induced ocean waves and Stokes drift and their impacts on surface transport and dispersion in the Gulf of Mexico.” Geophysical Research Letters.
  32. Zhu et al. (2016). “Impact of storm-induced cooling of sea surface temperature on large turbulent eddies and vertical turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer of Hurricane Isaac.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  33. Coelho et al. (2015). “Ocean current estimation using a Multi-Model Ensemble Kalman Filter during the Grand Lagrangian Deployment experiment (GLAD).” Ocean Modelling.
  34. Jacobs et al. (2014). “Data assimilation considerations for improved ocean predictability during the Gulf of Mexico Grand Lagrangian Deployment (GLAD).” Ocean Modelling.
  35. Donelan et al. (2012). “Modeling waves and wind stress.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
  36. Nickovic et al. (2011). “Method for efficient prevention of gravity wave decoupling on rectangular semi-staggered grids.” Journal of Computational Physics.

Software