Below you will find extended biographies for many of the participants in the Mathematics of Sea Ice Phenomena programme (August – December 2017).
Dr. Yevgeny Aksenov
Yevgeny Aksenov is a senior researcher at the National Oceanography Centre (UK) with expertise in ice rheology and in sea ice and ocean modelling and observations. His recent research interests include coupled ocean-waves-sea ice modelling, dynamics of the Marginal Ice Zone, climate impacts on maritime industries in ice-covered areas. Yevgeny contributed to the development of sea ice models in the various UK and International projects, including the ArcIce, ARTHER and ASBO projects, the EU MAST-III “Ice State”, FP7 “MyOcean” and “Ships and Waves Reaching Polar Regions (SWARP)”. He took part in the four field campaigns in the Arctic, measuring sea ice deformations and thicknesses in-situ and performing ice areal surveys, and have also participated in ocean mooring programs in Bering and Chukchi seas, in the Bering Strait and the North Pacific. Yevgeny contributes in the UK Joint Marine Modelling Programme (JMMP), and in the NEMO Sea Ice and NEMO Wave Working Groups and to the new ESA missions proposals “Sea surface KInematics Multiscale monitoring, (SKIM)” and SEASTAR to resolve coupled ocean-ice-waves dynamics in coastal, shelf and polar seas.
Dr Luke Bennetts
My sea ice related research interests focus on modelling the dynamics of the marginal ice zone, particularly wave–ice interactions. Recent projects include (i) integrating wave-induced breakup of Antarctic sea ice into the CICE sea ice model; (ii) modelling wave-induced collisions between ice floes; and (iii) modelling wave overwash of ice floes. I am currently involved in projects to (i) measure winds, waves and ice motions in and around the Antarctic marginal ice zone; (ii) model drift of the Antarctic ice edge; and (iii) model wave-induced ice breakup using laboratory facilities.
Robert Bridges
Robert Bridges holds the current position of Ice Engineer, Development/Technology/Geosciences. Specialist for ice engineering studies and providing technical expertise prior to, at start up, and during operations of a project. Contributes to the design and operation of floating production units, fixed platforms, LNG or oil terminals, coastal facilities, ships, etc, in cold regions where Total is involved. Responsible for research budgets, direct supervision, and engineering linked to sea ice conditions. Worked as Project Engineer at Lloyd’s Register from 2001-2013 involved in marine technical investigations and structural assessments, being responsible for the development of ice class and winterisation rules, as well as providing technical advice and participation in related research projects. At Total has participated in design of the Arctic Yamal LNG carriers and in design of Kalamkas Caspian Sea artificial island project.
Professor John Dempsey
My research interests include the effect of scale on the strength and fracture properties of quasi-brittle materials, particularly freshwater and sea ice; the analytical and experimental mechanics of materials behavior; the fracture mechanics of creep-brittle (quasi-brittle) materials; contact mechanics; composites and new materials; elasticity. The constitutive and fracture of ice has been studied via in-situ experiments on floating plates of ice in the Arctic, Antarctica, Svalbard, and in the model basins at CRREL and Aalto University.
Professor Dany Dumont
Dany Dumont is currently a professor of physical oceanography at Institut des sciences de la mer de Rimouski (ISMER) at Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR), Québec, Canada. He holds a PhD in oceanography from Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS-ETE, Québec) during which he studied the phenomenon of ice arching and the associated oceanic response. In 2009-2010 he worked as a postdoc researcher at the Nansen Center (Bergen, Norway) where he developed a modelling framework for studying wave-ice interactions and floe size distribution in marginal ice zones. Since 2011, he launched several projects and collaborations to deepen the understanding of wave-ice interactions and the physics of the ice-infested surface of the ocean. Notably, he set up a coastal photogrammetric observatory and developed an innovative in situ field sampling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence making use of ice canoes for accessing safely unstable and wavy ice conditions. Observational evidence arising from this program, supplemented by remote sensing data, are used for the development and test of parameterizations and numerical implementations of physical processes in various model code such as WAVEWATCH, CICE and simpler 1D toy models. He is closely collaborating with national operational services and a variety of partners to understand challenges related to model coupling, environmental forecasting and end-users needs. Professor Dumont is involved is many multidisciplinary research projects and networks through which his engagement and enthusiasm towards impactful research, training, education and art can be fulfilled.
Professor Danny Feltham
Danny Feltham is Professor of Climate Process Physics in the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading and he runs a research group in polar oceanography with a strong focus on sea ice. Danny’s academic background is in physics and applied mathematics and his research interests cover the fundamental study of physical processes in the cryosphere using continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, devising new mathematical models of these processes, using these models to generate new understanding, and developing parameterisations suitable for implementation into climate models. Scalability, homogenisation, isotropy, and continuity are frequently occurring issues. Danny’s work combines the development of new theory with numerical simulations and laboratory experiments, and utilises field measurements and remotely-sensed observations.
Dr Daniela Flocco
Daniela Flocco studied Environmental Sciences, majoring in oceanography at the Università Parthenope in Naples, Italy. She earned her PhD with a thesis on the geophysics of Antarctic coastal polynyas and their impact on dense water production based on her studies at SPRI and DAMTP at the University of Cambridge. She has then been working on the thermodynamics of sea ice focusing on the role of melt ponds on the enhanced thinning rate of Arctic sea ice. She has implemented a model of physics of melt ponds in a the CICE model, used within the IPCC. At present, she works as a Senior research fellow in the Meteorology Department at the University of Reading on a new project focusing on the Atmosphere to ocean momentum transfer by sea ice.
Dr Tao Gao
My research interest is on nonlinear waves. The problem is concerned with a two-dimensional irrotational flow of inviscid and incompressible fluid. The upper free boundary of the fluid, which is also called the free-surface, is deformed by a train of waves. The problem of gravity-capillary waves and flexural-gravity waves are both considered. Gravity and surface tension are present in the former case while surface tension is replaced by the pressure exerted by an elastic sheet in the latter case. Flexural-gravity waves have many applications in the presence of ice sheets in polar regions, e.g. road design, ice breaking and etc. A simple schematic is sketched as below. The major objective is to investigate the shapes and the properties of these waves. Several different numerical methods are used to solve full Euler equations which describe the fluid motion. The problem of the dynamics and the stability can also be worked out. Recently I focus on solving Euler equations for non-symmetric waves. This can be achieved by studying the symmetry-breaking problem.
Professor Kenneth M. Golden
Kenneth M. Golden is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Utah, with interests in sea ice, climate, composite materials, statistical physics, diffusion processes, inverse problems and remote sensing. He has published papers in a wide range of scientific journals, journeyed eighteen times to the Arctic and Antarctic to study sea ice, and given over 400 invited lectures on six continents, including three presentations in the US Congress. His work has been covered extensively in the media, including profiles in Science, Scientific American, and Physics Today, with numerous interviews on radio and television. Golden is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, cited for “extraordinary interdisciplinary work on the mathematics of sea ice,” an Inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a Fellow of the Explorers Club, whose members have included Robert Peary, Sir Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong, and Jane Goodall.
Professor Nico Gray
Nico Gray is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Deputy Director of the Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics a joint Institute formed by the School of Mathematics and the School of Physics & Astronomy at Manchester University to study nonlinear phenomena through a combined approach of theory, numerical computation and laboratory experiment. Nico is an expert on granular flows and is developing models for the flow and segregation of particulate systems in geophysical and industrial environments. In particular, Nico is keen to find out whether the significant recent advances in describing the rheology of granular materials might also find application to the large scale rheology of sea ice. This links back to Nico’s PhD, which looked at the underlying theoretical description used in sea-ice models and which showed that some of the classical models were ill-posed.
Professor John Grue
John Grue (born 1957), Professor at Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo, Norway (since 1994) publishes theoretical and experimental papers on: Marine hydrodynamics (surface wave interaction with ships offshore structures), internal waves and surface waves. He has also worked with Vortex Induced Vibrations. Current research interests include: Ship generated mini-tsunamis, wave-induced drift velocities, stability of internal waves, the dead water problem, ice-induced vibrations of bottom fixed geometries, aspects of mathematics for ice problems. He was chair of: The International Workshop on Water Waves (iwwwfb.org) (2007-2017) and represents Norway in the GA of IUTAM. John Grue is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Dr Agnieszka Herman
I work at the Institute of Oceanography (University of Gdansk, Poland). I’m using discrete-element methods to analyze numerically sea ice dynamics “at the floe level”. In particular, I am interested in relationships between the floe-size distribution (FSD) and dynamical processes in sea ice at different spatial scales, i.e., the influence of the extreme polydispersity of sea ice on its response to atmospheric and oceanic forcing, as well as the role of sea ice deformation and fracture in shaping the FSD. I have developed a Discrete-Element bonded-particle Sea Ice model (DESIgn) — implemented as a toolbox for the widely-used granular simulation software LIGGGHTS — suitable for studying dynamics and fracture of sea ice represented as a two-dimensional (bonded) granular material. Recently, I have been working on coupled sea ice–wave model, with a DEM sea ice module and a wave module based on the open-source nonlinear hydrodynamic wave model NHWAVE.
Dr Richard Hindmarsh
Richard Hindmarsh is a glaciologist and ice-sheet modeller, who deals mainly with ice of meteoric origin. He is primarily an ice-sheet modeller, but also does field work with ice-sounding radars. His modelling work includes both theoretical developments and coding numerical models of ice flow – these deal with the flow of land-based ice-sheets and floating ice shelves. He received a BSc in Environmental Science from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and a PhD in glacier modelling from Durham University. He worked as a post-doc at UEA and at Edinburgh, before joining BAS in 1991. He is interested in finding out about many different aspects of ice-sheet geophysics; the coupling of temperature and ice-flow, which almost certainly plays a role in ice-stream formation; the flow dynamics near where the ice starts floating, which is a significant control on the stability of marine ice-sheets; sub-glacial sediment deformation and landform genesis; measuring strain-rates at depth within ice-sheets using radars; explaining the geometry and architecture of radar-detected isochrone layers within the ice; and explaining observations which relate ice-shelf frontal velocity to the shelf width, thickness and frontal strain-rate. He has published more than one hundred papers on these topics, has managed several ice-sheet modelling and glaciology projects and has carried out Antarctic field work in five different seasons. His current projects, all involving collaborators, include modelling the retreat of the British-Irish Ice-Sheet using recently acquired data; modelling the retreat of the West Antarctic ice-sheet over the past 20 ka, and looking afresh at ice-stream formation and modelling the formation of ‘accretion plumes’ under ice-sheets.
Dr Chris Horvat
I am an oceanographer based at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington, New Zealand. I am currently a Voss Postdoctoral Fellow and NOAA Climate and Global Change Fellow at Brown University, and my research is motivated by the need to understand and model links between small (below the climate model grid) and large scales in Earth climate system. My past research has examined the role of sea ice floes in the climate system, in particular their impact on sea ice melting and phytoplankton blooms. At NIWA, I am working with Lettie Roach, Sam Dean, and Alison Kohout to develop new sea ice models incorporating the sea ice floe size and thickness distribution, and examining feedbacks between ocean waves, sea ice, and climate. At Brown, I am working with Baylor Fox-Kemper to develop new mixing schemes for understanding the evolution of Arctic water masses.
Professor Roger J Hosking
Roger Hosking has been a mathematics professor for more than 40 years. His published research has extended from MHD instability to various topics in fluid mechanics such as shallow flow over curved beds, moving loads on ice sheets,
and on rail tracks (notably the floating ladder track). At present he is working with Luke Bennetts and Michael Meylen on the mathematical modelling of long wave interaction with ice shelves, and in particular is interested to chat with anyone familiar with recent related fieldwork. He co-authored the research monograph “Moving Loads on Ice Plates” (1996), co-edited “Aspects of Mathematical Modelling” (2008) and co-authored the postgraduate textbook “Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics and MHD” (2016), all available from Springer — and earlier he co-authored a textbook for beginning undergraduate students entitled “First Steps in Numerical Analysis” (2nd edition 1996). Roger is a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and a Managing Editor of the East Asian Journal on Applied Mathematics published by Cambridge University Press.
Dr Elizabeth Hunke
Elizabeth Hunke is a scientist and the Deputy Group Leader of the T-3 Fluid Dynamics and Solid Mechanics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her educational background includes B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics, a discipline she chose for the flexibility it provides. She studied hurricanes initially, but her specialty has since become sea ice and polar climate. Elizabeth is the primary developer of the Los Alamos Sea Ice Model, CICE, which is used in numerous operational and climate modeling centers around the world, including the U.S. Navy, the U.K. Met Office/Hadley Centre, and the NCAR/DOE Community Earth System Model CESM. CICE was developed for global climate studies on highly parallel computing systems, but it is also used for smaller scale, higher resolution studies of regional climate processes. Elizabeth now leads the CICE Consortium, an international group of institutions jointly maintaining and developing CICE in the public domain for the research and operational communities. Elizabeth represents the U.S. for the International Arctic Science Committee, Cryosphere Working Group, and was a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports. She served as co-chair for the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Polar Climate Working Group for 14 years and now serves on the CESM Advisory Board. Elizabeth received the CESM Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002, LANL’s “Woman Who Inspires” award in 2014, and is the Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge UK, in 2017. She also plays French horn with numerous local musical groups and is an instrument rated private pilot.
Professor Gérard Iooss
Emeritus Professor at Université Cote d’Azur (UCA), in the Mathematics Laboratory. My interests at present are mainly bifurcating quasipatterns in fluid mechanics, even though I still have interest in waterwaves.
Dr Tatyana Khabakhpasheva
Dr Tatyana Khabakhpasheva is a senior researcher from the Lavrentyev Institute of Hydrodynamics in Novosibirsk, Russia. She is also a research visitor at the University of East Anglia at present. She obtained her PhD and Masters degree in Mathematics and Physics from Novosibirsk State University, where she has professor position in Mathematics since 2009. Her current research focuses on hydroelastic waves propagating in a frozen channel and reactions on loads moving along the frozen channel. She is also interested in investigating water impact problem in the presence of broken ice, by using semi-analytical and computational methods.
Professor Alexander Korobkin
I am an applied mathematician from the University of East Anglia, UK. I am also an organiser of this scientific programme on sea-ice. My main interests and results are in the field of violent unsteady free-surface flows and their interaction with rigid or elastic bodies, such as ship slamming, sloshing of liquid cargo, breaking wave impact, floating elastic plates, hydroelastic, surface and interval waves. My current research includes propagating hydroelastic waves in an ice channel, interaction of hydroelastic waves with offshore structures and ships, and vertical penetration through continuous and broken ice. I am keen to cooperate with researchers working in the same fields but using computational and experimental means, in order to compare my theoretical findings by simplified models with the predictions by more detailed computational models and laboratory experiments.
Professor Pat Langhorne
I have been fascinated by the polar regions since my teenage years. After undergraduate physics at the University of Aberdeen (in Scotland) I completed a PhD on sea ice at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England. In 1985 I was invited to take part in an Antarctic experiment which took me to New Zealand for the first time, and since 1988 I have been teaching physics and researching sea ice physical processes at the University of Otago. Working with post-graduate students and with national and international collaborators, I have taken part in more than twenty research visits to Antarctica. The coastal sea ice of Antarctica is significantly influenced by proximity to an ice shelf. Due to melting in the ice shelf basal cavity, very cold water emerges at its edge. Ice crystals can appear in the water column, attach themselves to the ice-water interface, and grow in the extremely cold water there. This ice preserves a record of the oceanographic conditions at the time of its formation during the Antarctic winter. The challenge of interpreting this ocean signature, and understanding its relation to the properties of the sea ice cover, is an interest of our group. We expand our understanding by creating models. Recently, the area over which we can understand these processes has expanded because of techniques in airborne sea ice thickness measurement and satellite remote sensing.
Associate Professor Michael Meylan
My research interests are in wave theory, mainly focused on water wave theory, ranging from the theoretical to the practical. Most of my work has been concerned with water waves, but I have also worked on platonic crystals and the Boltzmann equation. A major focus of my research in on wave scattering in the Marginal Ice Zone.
Professor Touvia Miloh
Touvia Miloh is currently a Professor Emeritus with the Faculty of Engineering at the Tel Aviv University (TAU) ISRAEL. He received B.S (1965) and M.S (1968) degrees from the Technion I.I.T and a Phd in Theoretical & Applied Mechanics from the U. of Iowa (1971). He joined the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tel Aviv in 1973 and held various academic positions both at TAU (Dean of Engineering and Lazarus Chair for Hydrodynamics & Aerodynamics) as well as several visiting professorships abroad. His current interests include free-surface hydrodynamics, fluid- structure interaction, hydro-acoustics, hydro-elasticity and electrokinetics.
Professor Gennady Mishuris
Gennady Mishuris is a professor of Mathematical Modelling in the Department of Mathematics, within the Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Sciences at Aberystwyth University. He was recently awarded by Wolfson Research Merit Award by Royal Society. His research interests are on the borderline between mathematics, engineering sciences and applications. He works on boundary value problems in complex domains with various transmission conditions and singular points, factorisation of matrix-functions, Wiener-Hopf techniques and their applications. Those occur in the analysis of fracture in structures and composites with imperfect interfaces, waves and fracture waves, elasticity, plasticity and viscoplasticity with applications to various technological processes. He is also interested in modelling problems of biomechanics such as contact problems for articular cartilage and new testing techniques for biological tissues. Recently, he has developed research into solid-fluid interactions, or more specifically in the mathematical and numerical analysis of hydraulic fracture technologies and the Hele-Shaw problem, proposing effective computational algorithms for hydraulic fracture and related problems.
Professor Leslie Morland
Emeritus Professor, School of Mathematics, UEA. Published work with Gray, Staroszczyk and Shulkes at UEA on sea ice dynamics in 90’s, adopting a two-dimensional interacting continua flow theory. I am interested to see how this has been advanced and what the current questions are, and in particular if my approach can be extended to capture further processes viewed as significant. Current work is on ice fabric evolution (induced anisotropy) as crystals rotate during deformation.
Johannes E. M. Mosig
I am a PhD student in my final year at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Otago in New Zealand. Despite my affiliation and affinity with mathematics, I am a physicist at heart. Currently, I am focusing on writing up my PhD thesis which is dealing with ocean wave / sea ice interactions. Besides my PhD work, I collaborated with Christian Fräßdorf at the Free University of Berlin – where I completed my BS in Physics – on a project investigating electronic properties of graphene. Throughout my academic career I have worked on particle (hadron) physics, general relativity, and various other projects. My thesis consists of three parts, where each part is concerned with a different characterization of wave–ice systems. In the first part I focus on floe / scattering models and use generalized polynomial chaos techniques to estimate the variance in a floe’s scattering cross-section when parameters are uncertain. In the second part I investigate effective medium models, such as the one proposed by Wang and Shen (2010). In the final part I attempt to establish an analytic relation between local scale scattering models, and transport equation models such as the one implemented in WAVEWATCH III. Please refer to my website (jem-mosig.com) for more details on my background / publications.
Dr Michael Nieves
Dr Michael Nieves is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Mechanical, Chemical and Material Engineering, University of Cagliari. He is also a lecturer at the School of Computing and Mathematics, Keele University. His main research interests involve waves and dynamic failure in structured media and the analysis of vibrations in chiral metamaterials, with a view to developing a new breed of metamaterials with applications to civil engineering and the nuclear industry. He also models granular materials with a novel mesoscale asymptotic approach, well suited to boundary value problems for densely perforated solids, which he also plans to develop further in modelling sea ice phenomena.
Dr Emilian Parau
Dr Emilian Parau is a Reader in Applied Mathematics at University of East Anglia. He obtained his PhD in Mathematics from University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France) and West University of Timisoara (Romania) in 2000. His current research focuses on nonlinear hydroelastic waves in two and three dimensions, propagating under a continuous or fragmented floating ice plate. He is currently interested in investigating solitary waves in stratified fluids and their stability, three-dimensional solitary waves, fluid-structure interactions, elastic cells in uniform flows and nonlinear waves in ferrofluid jets by using computational, asymptotic and dynamical systems methods.
Professor Malte Peter
Malte A Peter is the Professor of Applied Analysis at the University of Augsburg in Germany. His general research interest lies in modelling, analysis and simulation of multiscale phenomena in continuum mechanics, often in close collaboration with experimentally working scientists. Recent projects include mathematical aspects of wave propagation through heterogeneous media such as the interaction of ocean waves and sea ice, wave phenomena in nondestructive testing of composite materials, degradation mechanisms in porous materials as well as physico-chemical processes in biological materials. With respect to mathematics of sea ice phenomena, he has a long lasting close research collaboration with Luke Bennetts and Michael Meylan. Besides being head of the Research Unit Applied Analysis in Augsburg, he is currently Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Materials Engineering and an associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics.
Dr Pierre Rampal
Dr. Pierre Rampal holds a Phd in Glaciology and Physical Oceanography from the Grenoble Alpes University (UGA), has been post-doc at LOCEAN (Paris, France), and at MIT (Cambridge, MA, USA). He is researcher at the Nansen Centre (Bergen, Norway) since May 2012. Since 2017, he is member of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (Bergen, Norway) leader group. Pierre’s research focuses on sea ice physics, variability and forecast. He looks at the interactions between sea ice and the other components of the climate system, with a particular interest on the Arctic region. Pierre has expertise in both sea ice modelling and observations statistical analysis, as well as some experience in data assimilation. He currently leads the development of the next generation sea ice model neXtSIM with a team of 5 scientists. Before, he has been working on the multi-scale characterisation of sea ice and earth crust dynamics and on the modelling of sea ice age and types in the MITgcm coupled ice-ocean model. In parallel of model-oriented research, he also worked actively on issues related to the remote sensing of sea ice drift, thickness and lead fraction from satellites. His ongoing work relates to the space-time coupling of the scalings of sea ice deformation, and on the the impact of sea ice surface properties on the heat and momentum budget. Future work may focus on integrating the neXtSIM model into a pan-Arctic forecasting platform, and into ocean-ice-atmosphere coupled systems.
Dr Kaj Riska
Joined Total S.A. in June 2012 as ice engineer – first in Extreme Cold group and from August 2015 in TEC/GEO being responsible for the Extreme Cold R&D envelope. Total innovation prize for Arctic LNG carrier in 2014. Graduated as a M.Sc. 1978 in Mathematics and D.Sc. 1988 in Naval Architecture from the Helsinki University of Technology. Professor of Arctic Marine Structures in the Helsinki University of Technology and after academia director of a smaller ship design company ILS Ltd. Professor II at the Norwegian Science and Technology University in Trondheim. Member of WG8/SC7 and the French representative in SC8. Specialist on the Finnish-Swedish Ice Class Rules for the Finnish Maritime Administration. Contributed to design of several icebreakers and ice breaking ships, and to ice resistant FPSU in the Bohai Bay (with a soft yoke) and the Varandey terminal in the Pechora Sea. At the Helsinki University of Technology, he was responsible for the large ice laboratory at the university. About 60 refereed articles in scientific journals and a score of conference papers.
Mr. Erick Rogers
Mr. Erick Rogers has 21 years experience with wave model application, validation, and development (both model physics and numerics). He has been a contributor to the SWAN model code since 1999 and is a core member of the WAVEWATCH III (WW3) development team. (Both SWAN and WW3 are widely used phase-averaged numerical models for wind-generated ocean waves.) He graduated in 1996 with a M.Sc. in Civil Engineering with his thesis in the field of coastal engineering (more specifically, longshore sediment transport), and worked as a contractor for the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) from 1996 to 2000, and has been an oceanographer for NRL since 2000. He was PI of the project to transition WW3 to the Naval Oceanographic Office. He has made important contributions to wave models, such as numerical upgrades to the SWAN model in 2000, physics upgrades to the SWAN model in 2007 and 2010 (wave-mud interactions and deepwater physics, respectively), and improved grid methods in WW3 (2009-2010) and new physics for wave-ice interaction in the WW3 model (2013-present). He is presently lead investigator of three projects: 1) study of wave-ice interactions and other physical oceanography in the Arctic, with particular focus on the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, 2) developing technology and guidance to improve operational forecasting of waves in ice-covered waters, and 3) implementation of the wave component of a global coupled modeling capability for the Naval Oceanographic Office. Project (1) is component of the “Sea State and Boundary Layer Physics” initiative of the Office of Naval Research: more information can be found here. Publications by Mr. Rogers and his co-workers can be found here.
Stefanie Rynders
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. My research is focused on coupled modeling of sea ice, ocean and waves. I have been working on sea ice rheology and ice fragmentation and am now more focused on surface waves. My main area of interest are the polar regions, but I have also done some work on wave climate in the Caribbean. I am also interested in more applied research; recently I was part of a project aiming to quantify environmental loads on offshore structures. I have a bachelor and master degree in physics from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and went on doing a PhD in sea ice-ocean modeling at the University of Southampton (UK).
Dr David Schroeder
David Schroeder is a Senior Research Fellow working for CPOM in the Department of Meteorology in the University of Reading. He has a PhD in Meteorology of the Arctic (Hamburg, 2005). In the last 12 years, David has developed a number of sea ice model codes. Since 2011 he has worked as sea ice developer for CPOM (melt ponds, EAP rheology, form drag, impact of waves) and provides sea ice model support for the Met Office and other UK users. Future research will include an extended usage of Cryosat ice thickness data to improve and constrain a sea ice model.
Professor Hayley Shen
Hayley Shen is currently a research professor at Clarkson University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research includes two fields: Granular Materials – Constitutive relations for a dry particulate material, including the effect of particle spin, particle shape, as well as the distribution of particle size. Transition of quasi-static to rapidly sheared flows. Effects of electrostatic and other long-range forces on granular assemblies. Interaction of machine boundaries with granular materials. Computational simulation of granular assemblies and polymer flows; Sea Ice Dynamics – Constitutive relations of marginal ice zones. Wave attenuation due to ice floe interactions in a wave field. Ice drift and collision rate in wave fields. Formation of pancake ice, limiting size and thickness of pancake ice covers. Ice productions rate in a wave field. Rheological properties and dispersion relation of a general ice cover. Remote sensing analysis of ice motion and ice morphology. Laboratory experiments of ice formation and evolution using cold room facilities.
Professor Hung Tao Shen
Hung Tao Shen is a Distinguished Research Professor in Hydraulic Engineering at Clarkson University. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanics and Hydraulics from the University of Iowa in 1974. Dr. Shen worked at the consulting company Sargent & Lundy in Chicago before joining the faculty of Clarkson University in 1976. Dr. Shen has collaborated with many international researchers. He was a visiting faculty at US Army CRREL, Lulea University, Iwate University, Hokkaido River Disaster Prevention Research Center, and Nanyang Technological University. His primary research interest is in cold regions hydraulics and has introduced an analytical framework for studying river ice processes. He has developed the transport capacity theory for frazil ice jams/hanging dams and the theory on dynamic ice transport and ice jams. His research group has developed comprehensive computer models for river ice processes, which have been applied to rivers worldwide. His current research interest is on morphological effects of river ice.
Professor Shen served as the editor of the Journal of Cold Regions Engineering of ASCE. He is a recipient of the ASCE Harold R. Peyton Cold Regions Engineering Award (2000), the ASCE CAN-AM Civil Engineering Amity Award (2000), the Larry Gerard Medal of the CGU-Hydrology Section (2001, 2015), the ASCE Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award (2007), and the IAHR Ice Research and Engineering Award (2008).
Professor Frank T Smith
Frank T Smith FRS occupies the Goldsmid Chair in Applied Mathematics at UCL and his main research interests are in aerodynamical and industrial modelling as well as biomedical, biochemical and social-interaction modelling. The applications range from ice growth, multiple ice-patch effects, finite sized particle behaviour in dynamic fluid-body interactions and storm studies to security design, aircraft safety, turbine blades, car-forewing design, and then on to food-sorting devices, blood flow, stroke, liquid crystal processing, rotors, multiple blade-wake interactions, branch properties, fistula design, impacts and splashes, consumer choice, social issues, city growth. Frank applies modelling with analysis, computations and experimental links throughout and seeks to make use of elements that may arise in common for a variety of the applications above, as is often the case.
Associate Professor Ryszard Staroszczyk
Ryszard Staroszczyk is Associate Professor at the Institute of Hydro-Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gdansk, Poland. He was introduced to the field of ice mechanics by Prof. Leslie Morland from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, in the mid 1990s, when they started work on constitutive theories for sea ice. These theories were subsequently implemented in sea ice pack models by using a finite-element method. In 1997–2003 he worked with Prof. Morland on constitutive theories describing creep-induced anisotropy of grounded polar ice sheets, and later on the development of numerical models for the flow of polar ice sheets on geophysical time scales. In the meantime, he became interested in micro-mechanics of ice, and in the mid 2000s he switched to the analysis of sea ice – engineering structure interaction problems. Recently he has been working on application of meshless discrete methods (primarily a smoothed particle hydrodynamics, SPH) to large-scale sea ice pack modelling. In the near future he is planning to use the SPH method to model the brittle behaviour of sea ice. His other research fields include mechanics of water-saturated soils, seismic wave propagation in saturated soils, and computational fluid dynamics.
Professor David Stevens
My main interests are in modelling, understanding and predicting the ocean and its role in the climate system. I have a definite preference for the high latitudes, including fieldwork. These interests have naturally led me to think about other aspects of the Earth System. A sea-ice model is nearly always a requirement for my research. Most of the research involves planet Earth and relatively complex numerical models, e.g. CICE for the sea ice. However I also use more theoretical approaches to aid interpretation and understanding of the complex models. In addition, I am currently developing an intermediate complexity climate model. Here there is a requirement for an inexpensive sea ice model. The current simple thermodynamic model, while cheap, definitely needs improvement. Recently I have become interested in modelling exoplanets, as well as Earth, which allows for an interesting exploration of parameter space and provides some useful idealised problems and test cases.
Associate Professor Court Strong
Court Strong is an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Utah. His research focuses on atmosphere-cryosphere interactions, principally related to the dynamics of sea ice and mountain snowpack. He uses a hierarchy of statistical and physically-based numerical modeling frameworks ranging from simple Markov chain models up to fully coupled global climate models. He uses hybrid statistical-dynamical modeling frameworks to investigate how atmospheric circulation impacts sea ice, and how these changes in sea ice feed back onto the atmosphere. He is interested in how climate variability influences the width of the marginal ice zone (MIZ) and has developed objective techniques for estimating MIZ width from remote sensing data. In his collaboration with mathematicians, he works on understanding complex processes such as melt pond evolution with the aim of optimizing the fidelity and computational expense of their representation in global climate models.
Professor Vernon Squire
Vernon is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, but he continues to do research focused on how ocean surface gravity waves interact with sea ice. This is hardly a new problem, as it was first investigated seriously from a mathematical perspective in the 1950s. But the complexities of sea ice, combined with a sudden realization by the sea ice, climate change and wave forecasting communities that wave-ice interactions may have been highly influential in the demise of Arctic summer sea ice have made it a hot topic that is currently attracting significant attention, including by the funding agencies. Squire has, for several years, worked on mathematical problems associated with wave propagation through continuous sheets of sea ice including those with heterogeneity, but his most recent focus has been on scattering when large numbers of ice floes are present. His background includes many in situ field experiments in the Arctic and Antarctic, so he is very aware that parsimonious mathematical models need careful validation and justification.
The significance of this topic to global climate change and to wave forecasting has stimulated an industry developing parametrizations of the wave-ice interaction processes. Squire is uncomfortable with this activity, as several solutions have been proposed that are physically unacceptable while mathematically erudite. His current and near-future work will be targeted on finding better ways to parametrize waves entering ice fields, so that forecasting products such as WAVEWATCH III® can do a better job at predicting how ocean wave spectra evolve when they enter fields of sea ice and the sea ice cover evolves due to the presence of waves.
Dr Timothy Williams
*2001-2006: PhD + 1-year-postdoc in Applied Mathematics (U. Otago, NZ)
*2007-2010: Postdoc in Applied Mathematics (U. Bristol, UK)
*2010-present: Postdoc + researcher (NERSC, Bergen, UK)
My initial research interests were mathematical methods for solving linear wave scattering problems for floating objects, which typically represented sea ice. For example, I looked at the scattering by semi-infinite floating elastic plates, and those with finite widths, or regions of variable properties (as a model for a pressure ridge in a large sea ice floe). I also looked a little bit into multiple scattering in random media and homogenisation.
Since starting at NERSC I changed towards representing wave-ice interactions like scattering and ice breakage in large-scale sea ice models, most recently in the next-generation sea ice model (neXtSIM).
Professor Andrew J. Willmott
Andrew Willmott is Professor of Physical Oceanography and Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University. His research interests include polar ocean circulation and the development of models for predicting the formation, evolution and decay of polynyas. Immediately prior to joining Newcastle University Andrew held the posts of Director of the NERC Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool followed by the Director of Science and Technology of the National Oceanography Centre located in Liverpool and Southampton.
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