University of Southampton, National Oceanography Centre Southampton
Very pleased to announce our new paper – published this month in Nature Communcations, called ‘Timescales for detecting a significant acceleration in sea level rise’.
The paper is open access and you can read it here:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140414/ncomms4635/full/ncomms4635.html
Very interesting idea – http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059998611!
Coastal defence – one of CNN’s 10 ideas – read.
Congratulations to my new PhD student Seb Pitman, who was awarded the prize for the best presentation by a first year PhD student at the Postgraduate Research in Marine and Earth Science Conference, held at the National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton in November 2013. This conference is primarily aimed at PhD and early-career researchers in a broad range of earth and marine disciplines, providing a platform to practice presentation skills and poster production. The event was a huge success with 80 delegates from a range of institutions, key note speakers from the University of Cambridge and Durham University, and industry representation in the form of Gardline Ltd.
Seb Pitman gave a presentation on the formation, persistence and spacing of rip currents. The talk outlined the basic form of rip currents and the great hazard they pose to casual and recreational users of the coastal zone, as well as the likely direction the PhD project will take. Seb’s research is a collaboration between the University of Southampton (Shari Gallop, myself, Sasan Mahmoodi), Plymouth University (Gerd Masselink), and UNESCO-IHE (Roshanka Ranasinghe). His research aims to create an automated method of detecting rip currents from video imagery to generate quantitative data sets from sites around the world.
I recently gave a talk on extreme sea level at an event called ‘The Impact of Natural Hazards on Energy Infrastructures’ held in London on 8th November 2013. The event was filmed and talks should be available online soon.
Some nice videos showing the breach of the Medmerry Managed Realignment Scheme:
http://www.takeoneproductions.co.uk/takeonestreaming/medmerry/index.html
Animation of storm surge of Super Typhoon Haiyan making landfall:
The model predicts maximum surge levels exceeding 5 metres near Tacloban City. The peak surge occurs some time after the cyclone has made landfall. At this point, the winds near Tacloban City change direction from easterly to southeasterly, and the cyclone starts pushing water into San Pedro and San Pablo Bay (i.e. the northwesterly part of Leyte Gulf).
Scientists develop new method to help global coasts adapt to sea-level rise. This work was done by Prof. Robert Nicholls with whom I co-direct the engineering in the coastal environment MSc.
Professor Ivan Haigh 