THE NSERC/MARTEC/AES INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH CHAIRS IN REGIONAL OCEAN MODELLING AND PREDICTION

In the fall of 1997, a proposal was submitted to NSERC to establish senior and junior chairs in ``Regional Ocean Modelling and Prediction'' within the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University. The senior chair is Dr. Richard Greatbatch and the junior chair is Dr. Jinyu Sheng. These positions are sponsored by the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), through their Atlantic Environmental Prediction Research Initiative (AEPRI), and by MARTEC, a local Halifax company that provides advice to clients working in the offshore coastal environment of Atlantic Canada. Part of the mandate of the chairs is to develop regional ocean models that can be used by AES and MARTEC as predictive tools. A particular goal is to build a coupled atmosphere/ocean numerical model.

CLIMATE VARIABILITY

The emphasis of AEPRI and the NSERC Industrial Research Chairs on seasonal time scales nicely complements the interannual to interdecadal work carried out by the Climate Variability Group, funded by the Canadian Institute for Climate Studies and led by Professor Jacques Derome of McGill University. Both Drs. Richard Greatbatch and Hal Ritchie are members of this group and are involved in research focussed on understanding the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Part of the proposed work will couple an ocean model to an atmospheric general-circulation model (AGCM) for use in climatic studies. A course-resolution ocean/climate model developed by the Richard Greatbatch group is to be used. Such modelling will also be carried out under the auspices of the NSERC Industrial Research Chairs as a contribution to AEPRI.