Stephen Kelly
I'm a scientist at the National Oceanography Centre. My research is focused mainly on marine connectivity: I use ocean models to investigate how currents connect different parts of the world.
Activity
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Stephen Kelly replied to Paul Kamill
Thank you for the feedback - I'll pass this on.
-Stephen
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Speaking of MH370, this is actually something that people at the NOC have been working on: using the NEMO model to investigate possible pathways that debris from the crash could have followed, and hence where the plane went down. Unfortunately the Indian Ocean is huge, so the likely crash area they identified is also large, but it's an interesting...
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Hi Roger,
Thanks for the feedback, I'll pass this on to the MOOC creators. In the meantime, there's a transcript available if there was anything you missed.
Stephen
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Hi Connie,
We have a marine robotics expert (Juliane) as one of the mentors for this course, so if you have any questions when you get to that part of the course please do ask!
Hope you enjoy the MOOC.
Stephen -
Hi Lee,
I'm not personally an expert on Chokka, but I've asked Mike Roberts who is very much an expert, so hope this helps:
"Squid are very smart. Squid are considered rare animals that have a very large brain to body ratio, and as part of that also very well developed nervous system. As octopus, they learn quickly. Because of all this - they are used...
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Hi Ineke, Sorry for the slow reply!
I'm not an expert on chokka personally, but I've asked Mike Roberts who wrote this lecture, and he had this to say:
"Chokka squid mainly spawn in the austral summer months, between Nov and April. This is their peak spawning season. Traditionally the very best month is Nov. You are correct in understanding that to catch...
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The black line is the 200m isobath (i.e. everything inside it is shallower than 200m, everything outside is deeper than 200m). You can see that there's a very narrow continental shelf along most of the East African coast, but also a bit that sticks out a bit further - that's the North Kenya Banks, and that extended bit of continental shelf is the topographic...
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This is just saying that Indian Ocean ecosystems are highly sensitive to human activity, because of the strong circulation connectivity - not that the circulation connectivity is sensitive to human activity.
The strong circulation connectivity means that whatever humans do in one place, many areas downstream are potentially affected by it.
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The term "geostrophic" can refer to winds and to ocean currents. On a large scale, the two main forces acting on the atmosphere/ocean are:
1. pressure gradient (which, on its own, would cause things to flow from high to low pressure), and
2. the Coriolis force (a consequence of the Earth's rotation - it deflects things to the right of their direction of...
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Yep, we definitely don't mean paint shops here! The ocean interior is the part of the ocean away from boundaries - i.e. away from strong coastal currents, beneath the surface boundary layer.
As for the wind, there is some small scale variability, but the dominant winds at the equator are from east to west all year round.
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Hi Diane,
When satellites have finished their mission, they typically make an adjustment to their orbit so that they re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in a controlled way and completely burn up like a meteor.
(Although there is still a lot of "space junk" just orbiting the planet - another pollution problem of sorts, but perhaps one for a different...
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@AllisterLinton Pollution is really good example of why we should care about predicting / understanding how the oceans behave.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a major incident where a tanker carrying various chemicals sank in the Indian Ocean, releasing pollutants into the ocean. In order to deal with the pollution as effectively as possible, we need to...
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You've got us mentors here to help you if you'd like to try to understand! Is there anything specific that you're stuck on?
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Hi Diane! Is there anything specific that you didn't understand? Happy to help if there's something that wasn't clear - that's what we're here for!
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Welcome to the course Chris! Keep an eye out for the National Oceanography Centre (or if you're very lucky, one of the research ships) next time you're around the Solent. The James Cook returned to dock just this week!
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In order to tackle problems like those you've mentioned, in particular climate change, it's essential that we do research into understanding the state of the planet and how it's changing.
In many cases we know what we have to do - e.g. rapidly curb CO2 emissions to limit climate change - but another big question is how we achieve that. Replacing fossil...
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While it's certainly good to hear that you trust scientists' expertise, it's not just the people behind models that lead us to trust them - in order to be sure that a model is doing something sensible, it's crucial that we validate it by comparing it to observations. No model is ever perfect, so understanding where we can have good confidence in what a model...
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Thank you for the feedback Oliver! Is there anything specific that you'd like to know about the engineering of AUVs?
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Hi Jill,
Excellent question, and I put it to our resident remote sensing expert, Fatma:
To access an accurate measure of SSH, additional geophysical corrections, such as the tide (hT), the geoid (hG), the wind and atmospheric pressure (hA); need to be applied. Thus, an SSH corrected from these combined effects can be derived as: SSH=(H-R)-hT-hA. The...
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Hi Subbareddy,
Without doing too much maths in this comment, there's a parameter called the Rossby number (Ro) which tells you how important the Coriolis force is compared to other forces acting on something. If Ro is small the Coriolis force dominates, and if it is large other forces are more important. The Rossby number is given by:
Ro = U / (f * L)...
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This last part is especially important: whenever we're using models to answer scientific questions, we first need to be sure that it's doing a good job of reproducing what we see in the real world: this is why model validation is an important part of many scientific papers.
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Hi Anne,
Thank you for the feedback!
In graphics here, we're seeing:
- Modelled chlorophyll-a at the ocean surface (blue/white/green maps). Here, green is high chlorophyll concentrations, and blue is low.
- Modelled upper ocean mixing depth (blue to dark red rainbow maps). In these, reds / warmer colours are where deep mixing takes place, bringing...
