Department of Ocean Science is pleased to announce that Prof. Julian MAK has successfully secured funding of HK$2.6 million (and around EUR 200,000 for the French side) through the France-Hong Kong ANR/RGC Joint Research Scheme for 2025/26. The funding will support a collaborative research project titled "Modelling the Ocean’s Breath: Improving Mesoscale Representation for Biogeochemical Cycles," which will run for a period of 36 months.
Similar to how we would be interested in how pollution generated within the urban canyons of HK gets dispersed (or “ventilated”) out of the urban landscape, MOBIM focuses on the ventilation of oxygen and carbon (as well as heat) within the ocean interior, which are crucial for understanding how the Earth’s climate evolves. The research is motivated by known issues in existing climate models, such as disagreements in the projection of oxygen minimum zones extents and severity, or the lack of decadal variability for carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean, both issues intimately related to ventilation. The project builds on a recent work involving Julian MAK with co-authors at University of Edinburgh and University of Oxford, demonstrating the GEOMETRIC scheme for modelling of large-scale ocean turbulence can lead to improved variability in ocean climate models over decadal to centennial time-scales (reference).
This project will involve a collaboration principally with Marina LEVY at LOCEAN, Sorbonne University as well as other researchers at the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France, the National Oceanography Centre in the UK and the University of Edinburgh and University of Oxford, to investigate the science cases relating to ocean ventilation in climate models, and with an aim for the results to contribute towards the upcoming CMIP7 and the associated IPCC AR7 report.
