Earth Sciences: Oceanography: Projects: Page 3

Project started in 1999 as co-operation between major regional marine research institutions with support of NATO Science for Peace Programme to explore, quantify and predict ecosystem variability of the Black Sea

The German contribution to the international CLIVAR program contributes mainly to climate variability on scales of decadal and longer periods, with emphasis on the role of the ocean for the dynamics and predictability of long-term climate variations.

An interdisciplinary research effort within the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) focussing on the variability and predictability of the slowly varying components of the climate system. It investigates the physical and dynamical processes in the climate system that occur on seasonal, interannual, decadal and centennial time-scales.

CLIVAMP is a research program whose objective is to investigate the long term variations of the thermohaline circulation of the Mediterranean Sea for time scales ranging from interannual up to changes during the ice ages. CLIVAMP will thus study the different states of the Mediterranean Sea during the past, its paleo-circulation and the processes affecting the ventilation and the overturning of the water masses.

The overall aim of the NERC CCMS "COIN" project is to improve the understanding of the active processes in coastal and shelf seas and their essential interactions, thereby enabling the development of coupled models for forecasting and management into the next century.

An ambitious seven-year programme of research into the development of methods for making predictions of coastal morphology over periods of up to decades.

The project is intended to help develop and trial a methodology to allow EU member states to fulfil essential obligations under Article 6.2 of the Habitats Directive. In the UK this is reinforced by MAFF High Level Targets for Flood and Coastal Defence, and will support the delivery of Biological Action Plans aimed at securing the management of Natura 2000 sites.

The purpose of the COAST3D project is to improve understanding of the physics of coastal sand transport and morphodynamics, and to produce validated modelling tools, and methodologies for their use, in a form suitable for coastal zone management.

sets out to meet the challenge to merge theoretical aspects, new field observations, laboratory measurements, and computer-generated data sets with computational and numerical considerations with the ultimate goal of significantly improving second-moment closure models.

Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science runs the Continuous Plankton Recorder survey, a long term plankton survey in the North Atlantic and North Sea. The database is online.