Researcher: Nicolette Chang is a researcher at the CSIR using numerical modelling to understand the physical oceanography of the surface ocean. She uses the ocean-ice-biogeochemical modelling platform NEMO for these purposes. Her duties include liasing with technical staff at the CHPC to get the ocean models up and running in parallel over numerous cores on their supercomputer. She also develops the model configurations for the research needs of SOCCO, these range from coarse global models to several high-resolution regional models in the South Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean at varying resolutions. The latter models are developed in collaboration with colleagues from Laboratorie de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnement (LGGE) in Grenoble, France due to the SOCCLI project.

Dr Chang obtained a PhD in Physical Oceanography at the University of Cape Town funded by a UCT/CSIR bursary. In her dissertation, she used the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) to investigate the seasonal cycle over the Agulhas Bank and to investigate the formation of the Cool Ridge. The developed model was used as physical conditions for several fisheries-related studies.