Tag: modelling

From storm surges to literature

The connection between storm surges in the North Sea and the new British Nobel Laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro

Judith Wolf, October 2017

I only met Kazuo Ishiguro’s father once. In April 1981 we both attended a session of the 5th UK Geophysical Assembly at the University of Cambridge. I was in the throes of my PhD study and looking at the effect of wind gustiness on wind-driven currents in numerical models. In our session, on “Air-Sea Interaction” there were only three of us (the third being Ed Monahan, who worked on wind waves), and being the last session on the Friday afternoon, and rather peripheral to the main topics of the conference, there were only the three of us left there to listen to each other’s presentations and dutifully ask questions. Shizuo Ishiguro’s talk was entitled “Extreme surge predictions by the quasi uniform steady wind/pressure field method” (*); he was known to me by reputation, although by this time his work was something of an anachronism, as the world had moved on to digital computers. He had built an analogue computer to model North Sea storm surges and was employed, like myself, at the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (IOS), but based at Wormley in Surrey, while I worked at Bidston Observatory in NW England.

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Earth Tides and Ocean Tide Loading

Trevor F. Baker, 2 November 2016

Research on Earth tides and ocean tide loading has an even longer history at Bidston Observatory than the work on ocean tides. This article gives a brief overview of the developments in these research areas following the measurements at Bidston in 1909 by John Milne, with particular emphasis on the contributions of the research groups at Bidston to the advances in these topics.

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Tidal Curiosities – The Whirlpool of Corryvreckan

Judith Wolf, 1 Sep 2016.

Most people know that the tide rises and falls periodically at the coast but not everyone is as aware of the periodic flood and ebb of tidal currents. These are of particular importance for mariners and need to be taken into account for navigation. Where currents become particularly strong, they can become known as a ‘tidal race’, which can be unnavigable at certain states of the tide.

Around the coast of the British Isles are many locations where a tidal race forms, usually in a constricted channel between two islands or an island and the mainland. In Scotland, between the islands of Jura and Scarba is the famous ‘Whirlpool of Corryvreckan’ – possibly the third largest whirlpool in the world (after Saltstraumen and Moskstraumen, off the coast of Norway). The Gulf of Corryvreckan, also called the Strait of Corryvreckan, is a narrow strait between the islands of Jura and Scarba, in Argyll and Bute, off the west coast of mainland Scotland.

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Tide and Storm Surge Modelling at Bidston Observatory

Philip L. Woodworth, 4 August 2016.

One of the main objectives of the research at Bidston Observatory was to understand more about the dynamics of the ocean tides, that is to say, the physical reasons for why the tide propagates through the ocean as it is observed to do. Before the advent of digital computers, the only way to approach these questions was from basic mathematical perspectives, in which eminent scientists such as Pierre-Simon Laplace in France excelled in the 19th century, and in which Joseph Proudman at Bidston was an acknowledged expert in the 20th century.

Similarly, there has always been considerable interest in the reasons for large non-tidal changes in sea level, including in particular those which occur due to the ‘storm surges’ generated by strong winds and low air pressures in winter. For example, following the Thames floods of January 1928, Arthur Doodson at Bidston chaired a committee for London County Council that undertook a detailed study of the reasons for the storm surge that caused the flooding, and made recommendations for protecting the city in the future.

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