Dr. Paul Holland Ocean Modeller

Contact Dr. Paul Holland
+44 (0)1223 22

British Antarctic Survey

Madingley Road, High Cross

Cambridge Cambridgeshire CB3 0ET United Kingdom

Biography

Research Interests

I am interested in any topic concerned with ice and oceans in the broadest sense.  My publications to date focus on the following topics:

Ocean-ice shelf interaction
Polar oceanography
Sea ice
Ice-shelf glaciology
Gravity currents
Lake hydrodynamics

Chronology

Funded Proposals 

Feltham et al., Calculating the rate of Antarctic Bottom Water formation using new theory, fine-scale modelling and observations.  NERC standard 2010.
Turner et al., The role of atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions in ice loss from Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers, West Antarctica.  NERC standard 2009.
Nicholls et al., The oceanic boundary layer beneath Antarctic ice shelves.  NERC standard 2009.
Piggott et al., Multi-scale modelling of the ocean beneath ice shelves.  NERC standard 2008.

Ph.D. Students

2012-present   Mohamed Elmagrbi (with Matt Scase, Nottingham University)
2011-present   Jim Jordan (with Matt Piggott, Imperial College, and Adrian Jenkins, BAS)
2010-present   Alek Petty (with Danny Feltham, University College London)
2010-present   Tom Millgate (with Adrian Jenkins, BAS, and Helen Johnson, Oxford)
2008-2012      Carl Gladish (with David Holland, New York University)

Biography

I spent my formative years at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, from which I emerged in 1998 with degree in Mathematics with Environmental Science. I then proceeded to Loughborough University to do my Ph.D., submitted in 2001 with the title "Numerical Modelling of the Riverine Thermal Bar". I developed an implicit finite-volume nonhydrostatic code to study the physics and ecology of the thermal bar, a downwelling plume in lakes that arises from the existence of a freshwater temperature of maximum density. We were particularly interested in the deep-water renewal of Lake Baikal in Siberia, so I enjoyed a trip to Irkutsk as part of the project.

After that, I spent 18 months at the Met Office as a developer of the Forecasting Ocean Assimilation Model, which produced 5-day forecasts of the world's oceans using a suite of nested traditional finite-difference hydrostatic ocean models that assimilated satellite and in-situ observations in real time. Shortly before the Met Office moved to Exeter in 2003, I escaped to a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London. I worked there with Danny Feltham on simplified models of Ice Shelf Water (ISW), meltwater which flows up the base of  Antarctic ice shelves. We produced a two-dimensional (depth-averaged) plume model that creaks on to this day.

This work neatly led onto my current job at BAS, which I started in July 2005. My remit is to use numerical modelling techniques to study oceans, ice shelves, and sea ice. I use complex full models such as MITgcm, ICOM, MICOM, and CICE, but I also like to use simpler models to examine reduced problems, and have even dabbled in the use of remotely-sensed data.  Other highlights of my time here so far include experiments in the cold-room down the road at DAMTP (August 2006) and in the 13m-diameter rotating tank in Grenoble (December 2006).  I also joined a research cruise to the Bellingshausen Sea (February 2007), during which I wrote a blog that you might be interested in.