Physical Oceanography

The dynamics of the oceans at large scales play a critical role in the the evolution of the Earth’s climate. The group studies wind-driven gyres, oceanic jets and vortices, all of which are inherently nonlinear and therefore difficult to model accurately. One of the fundamental questions in the field is how the energy added at the planetary scales cascades through many scales to eventually be dissipated at the microscales.

Biological Oceanography

Planktonic ecosystems are at the bottom of the food chain in the oceans and therefore have a large impact of all the biological organisms in the ocean. There are a variety of ways in which they can be modelled: 1) ordinary differential equations (ignore spatial variations), 2) partial differential equations (include spatial variations), 3) delay differential equations (include time-delays) and 4) partial differential equations (include size-spectra). It’s important to understand the reactions terms in the equations and see what kind of dynamics they can generate before coupling an ecosystem model to an ocean model. This is something that can easily be done using Oceananigans.jl. (see Software for more details.)

Solar Physics

The sun is essential to life on Earth, which makes understanding the sun and how it changes very important. The group has investigated magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in a variety of different theoretical models: three-dimensional MHD, shallow water MHD and quasi-geostrophic MHD. Particular attention has been given to the tachocline in the sun. Generally, we have tried to understand the dynamics of turbulence, jets and vortices in this region of high shear, in part to better understand how the solar dynamo is generated.

Computational Fluid Dynamics

Computational tools are perhaps the most powerful means through which we can investigate geophysical, biological and astrophysical fluid dynamics. There are a variety of different methods that can be used. The group has used finite volume methods Oceananigans.jl, Finite Element Methods Firedrake, spectral methods (SPINS) and finite difference methods. The philosophy of the group is to write code that we can use to study interesting scientific problems, and then share it in a way that other members of the community can also benefit from it. Please see Research/Software for more details.