Research project

Iceberg forecasting - from days to decades (ICECAST)

Research groups:

Physical Oceanography
Lead researchers:

Professor Robert Marsh
Status:

Not active

Project overview

Icebergs present a hazard to shipping and marine operations, and play an active role in climate change as the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica decline in size. Since the 1990s, we have been developing a model to represent the drift and melting of icebergs in the polar oceans. With NERC funding, this model has recently been implemented as an interactive option in the NEMO ocean model to investigate variable Greenland iceberg calving, and most recently to track a giant iceberg that calved from Antarctica in 2013. The NEMO framework is widely used throughout Europe, and the UK Met Office adopted NEMO around 2010. The Met Office has developed seamless prediction systems that use NEMO for daily forecasts in FOAM (Forecasting Ocean Assimilation Model), for seasonal forecasts in GloSea5 (Global Seasonal Forecasting) and for climate prediction in HadGEM3 (the latest in the Hadley Centre family of climate models). We propose to work with the Met Office and one other end user (Kongsberg Satellite Services) to provide the capability for forecasting and predicting the drift of major icebergs on timescale from days to decades.