Seminar by Arne Biastoch from Kiel University
18 July 2025
KST 10:00
The Seminar is being held in Room 1010 (Jasmin) – Integrated mechanical engineering building. Click here for the campus map.
Heat and carbon are the currencies of regional and global climate, constantly exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere. This exchange is strongly influenced by fine-scales ocean eddies—whirls—that flux heat and carbon towards, or away from, the air-sea interface. However, the proliferation of fine-scale processes, and their interdisciplinary and large-scale impacts, are poorly understood.
The new European Research Council (ERC) Synergy project WHIRLS uses a synergistic and interdisciplinary approach to study fine-scale processes across a continuum of scales (1–100 km), along with their impacts on air-sea exchange and marine biogeochemistry and biodiversity. The focus is on the upper 1000 m of the water column in the Agulhas Current System around South Africa, which is a global hotspot of eddy activity, ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, and marine productivity and diversity. It is also a key region for the global ocean circulation and global climate and climate change. WHIRLS will involve multiple coordinated observing strategies, including an extensive field campaign in austral winter 2026 with two research vessels and a large ensemble of autonomous platforms, to collect physical, chemical, and biological datasets across scales. These data will be supplemented by a hierarchy of high-resolution models of the ocean and the atmosphere down to the km-scale in the Agulhas Current System, as well as the latest data science methodologies.
The talk will outline the role of the Agulhas Current System in the exchange of heat and salt from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, with particular focus on the role of the inverse energy cascade, from the submesoscale to the large-scale circulation. It will also address how WHIRLS will systematically observe and model these processes, and how the international community might collaborate.