(Closed) (MMO) Multi-source Modelling of The Ocean: Coupling Earth Observations with Acoustic Waves

What is MMO about?

On bigger scales, ocean currents are considered to be uniform and horizontally homogeneous movements of seawater and have been a focus of investigation in physical oceanography. At smaller scales, ocean currents are highly heterogeneous and difficult to sample directly.

These processes have direct implications for primary productivity and vertical transfer of nutrients, as well as for vertical carbon mix into the deep ocean, with a direct impact on climate change. Due to sampling difficulties at both small and large scales, most of our understanding of the ocean processes are based on high-resolution numerical models, which run in large-scale computational infrastructures.

MMO proposal aims to explore current knowledge about the ocean through the integration of information from multiple sources of data to build three-dimensional ocean models.

What difficulty is MMO addressing?

Ocean currents both at smaller and larger scales are difficult to sample, requiring numerical models and expensive large-scale computational infrastructures. Modelling the complex small-scale ocean dynamics of the ocean have leveraged remote observations from multiple sources.

How will MMO model the complex small-scale ocean dynamics?

MMO will exploit the unique synergy between the expertise of the Portuguese and UT Austin teams on spatial data science methods, geophysics, scientific machine learning and computational mathematics to create computationally cheap high-resolution three-dimensional ocean models built from seismic oceanography data, satellite images and direct observations through a generalized spatial relationship between the three data domains.

How is MMO likely to impact oceanography investigation?

MMO will provide a unique capability of modelling the ocean at high resolution, using data that already exists and providing the opportunity to look at this reality from a completely new perspective.