Dave Munday

• Please introduce yourself.   

I’m Dave Munday, a physical oceanographer and numerical modeller. 

• Tell us about your professional and academic career before becoming part of the BIOPOLE Community.  

I previously worked at the University of Reading and University of Oxford before moving to BAS in December 2014. I started off working on western boundary current separation and flow past small islands, before specialising in Southern Ocean circulation and dynamics as part of the QUEST-DESIRE project. I’ve always specialised in using idealised models to isolate important dynamics/processes and understand their impact on ocean circulation. QUEST-DESIRE enabled me to branch out into carbon cycling and ocean biogeochemistry, which is a way to link those dynamics to large-scale climate. I’m particularly interested in the development of ocean circulation from the Cretaceous and Eocene epochs to the present day. 

• What do you do within BIOPOLE?   

As part of WP3 I’m using an idealised two-sector model of the Atlantic/Pacific to look at the import and export of carbon and nutrients from the Weddell Sea. I’m able to run the model to thermodynamic and biochemical equilibrium, which can take ~20 000 model years, which allows me to separate quite small changes because there’s no model drift to obscure them. I’m using a range of perturbation experiments and carbon/nutrient budgets to understand what forcing causes the import/export of carbon to change and what processes control its decomposition into different terms. It’s becoming clear that everything is strongly dependent on the ice cover and the expert of ice/freshwater from the Weddell Basin. High ice cover can influence the transport of carbon/nutrients due to the Weddell gyre by preventing it from responding to wind stress and other forcing changes. By warming the atmosphere I can reduce the winter ice cover and this allows other processes to play a more prominent role. 

• What have you enjoyed about BIOPOLE so far?  

The opportunity to return to carbon cycle modelling after a hiatus and delve into the details of how it influences the large scale climate. 

• Tell us about a skill or trait unique to you that you would like to share?  

To figure out how to turn a complex ocean with detailed bathymetry and forcing into a box with very simple surface forcing! And then make my tiny world dance to the tune in my head by altering everything (but not all at once). It took a long time to figure out the way to force my sector model, but now it’s very flexible and can be used to test a lot of ideas relatively cheaply.