About the Centre

The Australia-China Centre for Maritime Engineering is working to establish a new generation of metocean modelling in maritime engineering, wave-ocean forecasting and industry practice. The Centre will institute the international leadership of Australia and China in this discipline.

Aims and objectives

The Centre aims to initiate the next generation of wave models, wave–tide circulation coupled systems and ocean–atmosphere coupled models at the entire range of scales in air–sea interactions – from turbulence to climate. Progress in fundamental marine and engineering sciences, observational and numerical capabilities of the last decades makes the next breakthrough possible. The Australian and Chinese groups of the Centre possess complementary expertise; waves and air-sea interactions (Australia), and ocean and climate (China), with a track record of joint emphasis on wave-coupled effects in the ocean and lower atmosphere in which they are the world’s two leading groups.

Specific objectives include:

• Analytical research and direct (phase resolving) wave and ocean modelling, based on first principles
• New generation of spectral wave models, with fundamental physics replacing parametersations
• Coupling direct and spectral models to enable forecasting of individual extreme events rather than mean properties only
• Full coupling of wave and General Circulation Models (GCM), climate modelling based on holistic approaches
• Comprehensive experimental support of the modelling through field observations, satellite global ocean sensing and laboratory testing, combined with state-of-the-art probabilistic and statistical analyses
• Dedicated studies and developments for extreme oceanic conditions and poorly understood behaviours such as swell, wave–current interactions, and wave–ice interactions.

The conceptual framework of this proposal is a new strategic and united initiative, intended to change our views and approaches to the fundamental science of water/ocean waves and to the practical applications that involve wave and climate modelling or their statistical predictions.

These objectives will be broadly grouped into the following research themes:

• Analytical and direct modelling
• Spectral modelling
• Wave-GCM coupling
• Experiments and remote sensing
• Extreme conditions