The Marine National Facility RV Southern Surveyor.

The dynamic ocean: building foundations for climate, national security and sustainable marine industries

The Wealth from Oceans Flagship is creating and exploiting knowledge of ocean variability and change to deliver social, environmental and economic wealth to Australia.

• 3 July 2008 | Updated 31 October 2011

• Innovative tools
• Delivering with impact
• Gathering climate information
• Forecasting Australia's oceans

Australia is a climate-sensitive continent. Much of our climate and its variability is driven by the ocean and changes within it.

Gaining a thorough insight into the ocean’s physical and biogeochemical characteristics is critical to sustaining this natural resource and preparing Australia for climate change.

Innovative tools

The Flagship is delivering world-class science and robust tools that will:

• help shape Australia’s understanding of global climate change
• generate valuable services from knowledge of the ocean-weather system.

  This knowledge is vital for Australia's marine wealth and climate-sensitive, land-based industries.

This knowledge is vital for the safe, efficient and sustainable use of:

• Australia’s marine wealth, including industries such as fisheries, oil and gas and tourism
• climate-sensitive, land-based industries.

The Flagship draws on a global network of sustained, remotely-sensed and in situ ocean observations to:

• monitor changes in the oceans around Australia to identify the impacts of climate variability and change (eg sea-level rise, ocean acidification)
• assess models of circulation in the Southern Ocean to develop more accurate hydrodynamic models
• explore new ocean observing system technologies and assess fitness-for-purpose in our oceans.

Delivering with impact

Our research seamlessly covers all of Australia’s marine territory – from the beach to the open ocean – and encompasses time-scales from days to centuries. It will result in state-of-the-art data assimilation and modelling technologies to :

• improve the accuracy of ocean predictions
• design cost-effective ocean observing sytems.

We deliver these tools and associated knowledge to decision-makers in industry, government and the community.

By focusing on physics and biogeochemistry, the Flagship is building a strong platform for other research on ocean and climate issues such as:

• climate and atmosphere
• climate adaptation
• marine ecology
• fisheries
• seafloor.

Gathering climate information

During an eight-week marine science and oceanography expedition on the Aurora Australis, Wealth from Oceans Flagship scientists, with partners from the Antarctic and Climate Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre, discovered that the deep waters of the Southern Ocean are cooler and less salty than they were ten years ago.

These observations show that the dense water produced around the periphery of Antarctica is capable of rapid and widespread change.

In addition to this research, the Flagship has derived the first multi-century record of deep ocean temperatures in the southern hemisphere.

Forecasting Australia's oceans

The Flagship recently launched the BLUElink ocean forecast system with our partners, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Royal Australian Navy.

BLUElink provides the first seven-day forecast of sea temperature, salinity and currents for the Australian ocean region.

We are now enhancing BLUElink’s capabilities and developing the system for near-shore applications.

Find out more about our work with the Wealth from Oceans Flagship.