Oceanographers Awarded IMarEST Denny Medal

At a ceremony held in London on 11 March, scientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS) were awarded the prestigious Denny medal by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology (IMarEST) for the most worthy paper published in its technical proceedings.

The winning paper was written by Dr Margaret Yelland, Robin Pascal, Dr Peter Taylor and Dr Ben Moat in which they described AutoFlux, an autonomous system for making direct measurements of the air-sea exchanges of carbon dioxide, momentum and heat.

Previously deployed on the Royal Research Ship Discovery, AutoFlux is currently part of a three-year measurement programme on the Norwegian weather ship Polarfront, which is also equipped with wave measurement systems and digital cameras used to estimate whitecap fraction. The ship and its predecessors have occupied Station Mike in the Norwegian Sea continuously for nearly 60 years, only coming in to port for eight hours once every four weeks.

Robin Pascal has been crucial in developing the AutoFlux system for more than two decades. He said, “The beauty of AutoFlux is it can take measurements continuously over extended periods of time, sending data back via satellite to Southampton where it can be monitored and analysed in near real time. This is much better than relying on data taken on short-duration research cruises.”

Data collected by AutoFlux contribute greatly to our understanding of how interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere impact climate.

“The air-sea flux of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is of particular importance from a climate change perspective,” said Principal Investigator Dr Margaret Yelland: “However, it varies with wind speed and ocean conditions and in ways that are not as yet fully understood, making the data collected by AutoFlux all the more valuable.”

The same is true of heat transfer, for which only few direct measurements have been taken at high wind speeds in excess of 15 metres a second.

“Knowledge of what happens at high winds is necessary to improve our understanding of the generation and development of storms and hurricanes,” said Dr Yelland.

AutoFlux is run as part of the UK-SOLAS (Surface Ocean – Lower Atmosphere Studies) project HiWASE (High Wind Air Sea Exchanges). It is funded by the European Union, the NOCS Technology Innovation Fund, and the UK Natural Environment Research Council’s UK-SOLAS project HiWASE and Oceans 2025 programme.

Full report Journal of Operational Oceanography in 2009