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e-Science

Building models of all the continental shelves

For a particular shelf sea, such as the North Sea, researchers have traditionally needed specific models developed from scratch. This often means spending months gathering and configuring the data for each new model shelf sea.

Scientists have now developed an automated system (GCOM system) to set up models of continental shelves anywhere on the planet, drawing on global datasets of parameters such as water depth, weather conditions and river run-off. This shortens the processes to a matter of minutes, allowing researchers to quickly build models of the 60 or so shelf seas around the globe.

Talking models

Most continental shelves (and their related shelf seas) are connected to other continental shelves. What makes the GCOM system unique is that the various shelf-sea computer models can talk to each other, exchanging information. This allows scientists to make integrated predictions of how coastal regions will respond to environmental change.

Connected supercomputers

Each of the shelf-sea models requires the massive computer power available from large clusters of computers. The team are developing grid computing tools to spread the workload without affecting other people using of those machines.

The tools are easy to use and it looks like the model is running on the user's desktop, even though it is actually running on a remote machine.