Shelf and Coastal Processes

Oceans 2025 Theme 3

Our coastal and shelf seas are vital for shipping, fisheries, aggregates, renewable energy, and leisure. At the same time our coastal environment receives waste water, nutrients and other farming and industrial contaminants. As a society heavily dependent on the services provided by our marine environment, we want to maintain the capacity of our seas for sustainably supplying us with its resources, without being harmed by our actions. The scale and complexity of the marine system means that we are becoming very dependent on computer models that can provide operational forecasts (e.g. the National Centre of Ocean Forecasting) and longer-term predictions (e.g. as our climate drifts) of how the environment responds to our demands.

The computer models are not perfect. We know of processes that the models do not simulate correctly, and we know of others that the models simply do not include. The basis for any model improvement needs to come from good observations of processes, which provide us with both the understanding to develop the models and the data with which to test the models. The work within the Shelf Sea Processes theme aims to provide this observational basis for model improvements, on scales ranging from the global impacts of shelf seas to the details of how sediments are mobilised around our coastline. The work is strongly linked to "Technology Development", with new instruments being deployed as a part of our process studies, and to "Next Generation Ocean Prediction Systems" by providing the necessary new data and process understanding for developing existing and new computer models.

Equipment being deployed off a research vessel

POL staff recovering equipment off the Norfolk coast as part of Shelf and Coastal processes research