West African Coastal Ocean - Finescale physics, biogeochemistry and climate change

ended

Coastal oceans are essential to our societies but their health status is degrading rapidly in many parts of the world. Anticipating or remedying environmental evolutions/degradations, including those resulting from global changes, is particularly difficult. This is largely because the knowledge and information we currently have on the ocean functioning do not encompass scales finer than a few tens of kilometers, which is notably insufficient close to shores. WACO will clarify the role of fine-scale processes (turbulent and wave processes with scales < 10 km) in the present-day functioning and future evolutions of the West African coastal dynamics and biogeochemistry. To do so, it will take advantage of a new generation of ocean models that is truly apt to simulate coastal dynamics/biogeochemistry/ecosystems in a fully integrated and multi-scale manner. Precisely, the project will be focused on the senegalese and mauritanian coastal oceans from which state-of-the-art ocean observations are available to complement and evaluate the modelling effort, a robust and interdisciplinary collaborative framework, and unmatched opportunities for social benefits of the research. The project relies on a massively parallel computing plan that will serve as a demanding training ground for the applicant. Overall WACO will contribute to a deeper understanding of climate change, which is a key goal of EU research.