GCOMS: Global Coastal Ocean Modelling

This project aims to build a computer modelling system to explore the coastal marine environment on a global scale. It brings together physical oceanographers, ecosystem modellers and computer scientists from four leading UK research institutions to address the challenge of assessing what role shallow seas play in the global climate.

While shelf seas only occupy 7 percent of the area they require 70 times the computer power of the deep ocean because of the small scale processes, such as currents, tides and mixing. This is why we need oceanographers and computer scientists working together to find novel solutions to include shelf seas in our understanding of the Earth System. Normally, coastal ocean models are restricted in size to the area of the Earth under investigation. What makes our system unique is that we have built in the capability for each of the pre-defined shelf sea domains to exchange information. This can happen either between compute nodes on the same cluster or between different clusters on a compute grid, lending the system well to a compute resource such as the NW-GRID.

For further information see the Project Web site.