News
Associate Professor Isabelle Ansorge has been appointed as the new Head of the Department of Oceanography for a five-year term commencing 1 January, 2016.
The training course is organized by the Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre (OA-ICC) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and is hosted by the University of Cape Town and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) of South Africa.
The purpose of the course is to train early-career scientists and researchers from IAEA African Member States entering the ocean acidification field, with the goal to assist them in becoming able to measure ocean acidification and to set up pertinent experiments, avoiding typical pitfalls and ensuring comparability with other studies. Expected outputs also include increased networking among scientists working on ocean acidification in Africa.
In order to predict changing climate patterns in the coming years and decades, scientists need to understand the various interactions that take place within what is referred to as the earth system. This means understanding and predicting the interactions between atmosphere, land surface, ocean and sea ice, - known as the physical system - as well as the biogeochemical processes, such as the carbon cycle, which interact with this physical system. Today scientists can sucessfully model this system, but it entails an immense level of computing power. This is why the Department of Oceanography is partnering with UCT eResearch to use high performance computing (HPC) facilities for ocean and climate modelling.