New funding for the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory

3 July 2001

The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory has received the green light for its new five-year Science Plan. The governing council of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) last week approved the new funding package totalling £18.7m.

Dr Edward Hill, Director of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory said, "This is an excellent outcome for the Laboratory that will help keep it at the leading edge of a fast-moving field of science. The new funding package represents an overall increase on previous years and is a major vote of confidence in the work we do and our plans for the future".

The Laboratory's new 5 year Science Programme gains an increase in funding on previous years including an injection of £1m over the next 2 years for investment in new equipment.

The Science Programme will involve some highly innovative science, such as a new 'Coastal Observatory' in Liverpool Bay, measuring changes in the ocean currents from space and predicting climate change with a new type of buoy.

Scientists at Bidston will establish a 'Coastal Observatory' in Liverpool Bay. This will be an array of instruments to monitor changes in the movement of ocean currents and of sediments on the sea floor. These measurements will be used to test how well computer simulation models developed at Bidston (the ocean equivalent of weather forecast models) are working for coastal waters. The models will then be used to investigate how the water flow and plankton production in the shallow seas around the UK have altered over the past 50 years. By examining the patterns of the past they will be able to look at the possible ways in which our coastal waters will behave under a range of future climate change scenarios.

Another project will involve researchers at Bidston using instruments that can measure very small changes in pressure at the bottom of the ocean to test data from a new satellite mission called GRACE. The ultimate aim is to be able to measure deep ocean circulation from space.

This is possible because changes in water density and ocean currents slightly change the distribution of mass over the Earth's surface - which brings about changes in pressure at the sea bed which Bidston scientists will measure, but also can be measured from space by small changes in the orbit of the GRACE satellite.

Other equipment to be bought include instruments for detecting small, long-term movements of the Earth's crust, tide gauges to measure precisely how sea-level is changing, and radars for measuring changes in waves and sea-bed shape as coastlines are altered because of both human activity and climate change. The additional funding will mean a major increase in computing power to provide long-range simulations.

The new funding also includes a 20% increase to the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) hosted at Bidston. This is the primary centre for managing all oceanographic data collected by UK research programmes and is part of a world-wide network of Oceanographic Data Centres. Among the activities that the new funding will allow is the participation of BODC in the ARGO Project. This is an ambitious international programme which aims to improve our ability to predict climate change by seeding the world's oceans with over 3,000 'floats', that look like small buoys, which collect temperature measurements over a period of time. One of the main regulators of climate is the exchange of heat stored in the upper ocean with the atmosphere. ARGO floats will be parked 2 km beneath the sea surface throughout the world's oceans and periodically rise to the surface to measure the temperature of the upper half of the oceans (where most of the heat is stored) and transmit their data back to shore via satellite. BODC will manage data from the UK floats and ensure the data is made available world-wide.

The Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL), based at Bidston since 1933, also receives a substantial new injection of cash of more that 40%. The PSMSL is the global data archive of coastal tide gauge data and is the primary source of measurements for monitoring global sea-level change.

Further information

Dr. A.E. Hill
Director
Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Bidston Observatory, Prenton, CH43 7RA
Tel: 0151 6538633

NERC Press Office
Natural Environment Research Council
Polaris House, North Star Avenue
Swindon, SN2 1EU
Tel: 01793 411561
Mob: 07917 557215

Notes

1. The UK's Natural Environment Research Council funds and carries out impartial scientific research in the sciences of the environment. NERC trains the next generation of independent environmental scientists.

New funding for the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory

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