Supervisors
- Veronica Tamsitt (UNSW postdoc),
- Matthew England (UNSW)
The Southern Ocean plays a disproportionately large role in regulating Earth’s climate and is responsible for more than 40% of the ocean’s total uptake of anthropogenic carbon and over 75% of oceanic anthropogenic heat uptake.
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), the dominant feature of Southern Ocean circulation and the largest current on Earth, is made up of several distinct branches that separate water of different properties, known as fronts.
A voyage to the Polar front of the ACC on the RV Investigator south of Tasmania in late 2018 collected new, detailed observations of currents, upper ocean and atmospheric properties along and across the Polar Front in the ACC.
This project will quantify the impact of the front on air-sea exchange of heat and characterise how air-sea exchange and upper ocean properties change across the front. We are seeking a self-motivated student with a background in meteorology and oceanography and preferably experience programming in R, Matlab or Python.