Bangor Physical Oceanographers score a million pound hat-trick!

Physical Oceanographers from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences have recently won three research grants from the Natural Environment Research Council, one of the bodies which funds UK research. Together, the research grants bring a million pounds’ worth of new research to be conducted by the University.

The Bangor scientists are members of three successful consortia, made up of scientist from across the UK (and including Oxford University, Cambridge University, University College London, Reading, Southampton and Liverpool Universities). In total Bangor will receive over a million pounds of the new research funding.

The focus of the research is exchanges across critical interfaces within the Earth System. One project will focus on the impact of the wind blowing across the sea surface, whilst the second will focus on the exchange of water between the shallow continental shelf seas and the ocean.

The third project focuses on the Arctic, and in particular the impact of changes in Arctic Ocean sea ice cover on heat exchange between the Arctic Ocean and the atmosphere. As part of this project Bangor Scientists will join a Canadian Ice Breaker to pass through the fabled “North West Passage” in August 2012.

Dr Tom Rippeth commented:

“Future climate change is very difficult to predict with any certainty due to the complex feedbacks which occur between the different components of the Earth System. In each of these projects we will be joining scientists from elsewhere in the UK to make new measurements which will then help us to improve the way in which we represent these feedbacks in complex computer models of the global climate.”

Projects:

1)      OSMOSIS: Ocean Surface Mixing, Ocean Sub-mesoscale Interaction Study. This project is led by Reading University and partners are Southampton, Oxford, Bangor Universities, UEA, National Oceanography Centre, Scottish Association for Marine Science and the UK Met Office.

Bangor Principal Investigator: Tom Rippeth with Chris Old

2)      FASTNEt – Fluxes across the Sloping Topography of the North East Atlantic.  This project is led by the Scottish Association for Marine Science, and partners include Liverpool, Plymouth and Bangor Universities, National Oceanography Centre, Plymouth Marine Laboratory.

Bangor Principal Investigators: Mattias Green with Tom Rippeth and John Simpson

3)      TEA-COSI – The Environment of the Arctic: Climate, Ocean and Sea Ice. This project is led by the National Oceanography Centre and partners include Southampton, Oxford, Cambridge, Reading and Bangor Universities, UCL, British Antarctic Survey and Scottish Association for Marine Science.

Publication date: 19 July 2011