Technology Development

Oceans 2025 Theme 8

New and continual measurements give new knowledge of the ocean. POL's focus here is on measurement systems for hitherto unresolved processes, securing the underpinning physics of predictive models, and communications (telemetry) to make data available in near-real-time, long-term, for monitoring and forecasting systems.

Turbulence in the water column is a control on many processes, especially: air-sea momentum transfers; vertical fluxes of nutrients; patchiness in relation to shelf topography; mixing where internal waves are energetic; algal functional groups; phytoplankton photo-physiology and their mixing through light and nutrient gradients; SPM aggregation. Instrumentation to measure turbulence is developed in measurements systems.

Sediment dynamics control morphology, water quality and (biogenic) particle transports. Modelling entails parameterising small-scale processes of sediment transport. Instrumentation developed in measurement systems for simultaneous co-located profiles of near-bed turbulence and intra-wave flow, for suspended particle concentration and size, to resolve the wave boundary layer and variation of suspended sediments over a rippled bed; to distinguish suspended load, sheet flow and bed-load; for long duration to include storms.

Our research will use remote instrument control and continual data supply (to near-real-time Web display) from: coastal gauges for sea level, tsunami; deep-sea pressure for ocean circulation; sea-bed or moored instruments for currents etc. in the ocean interior and the POL Coastal Observatory. Large data volumes can easily be handled via broadband. Duration of the deep-ocean POL lander MYRTLE can be increased to ten years use BGAN retrieval. Broadband systems will deliver fast sampling in near-real-time, allowing monitoring of short-period events, e.g. tsunami, interrogation for assimilation in forecast models, rigorous tests of models, better reliability by fault diagnosis and rectification, remote-controlled sampling and less use of ships. Our research is develoopeing such telemetry.

Team

John Huthnance
Mike Smithson
Peter Foden
Chris Balfour
Richard Cooke
Geoff Hargreaves
Simon Holgate
Dave Jones
John Kenny
Steve Mack
Jeff Pugh