Andrea is a PhD student at the University of Exeter who is using different approaches to investigate the Southern Ocean carbon uptake. The Southern Ocean is believed to be a strong sink for atmospheric CO2, but its remoteness and often harsh weather conditions result in reduced observational coverage, especially in wintertime, and therefore in large uncertainties in the CO2 uptake estimates. One approach to increase data coverage is to further observations from autonomous platforms. One of the sensors for this is CaPASOS, which is under development at the University of Exeter. Another approach for closing data gaps is using coupled climate models and assimilate the available hydrographic and biogeochemical data to bring the simulation closer to observations. In her project, Andrea will use the recent NEMO-MEDUSA coupled model from the Met Office to investigate the impact of assimilating different data sets on the simulation of the Southern Ocean carbon sink and its variability.
Andrea studied at the University of Hamburg and received a Bachelor degree in Geophysics/Oceanography (2015) and Master degree in Physical Oceanography (2018). During this time, she gained sea-going experience during several research cruises in the Mediterranean Sea, the North and South Atlantic. She also did a voluntary internship at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, Scotland, in summer 2016, where she was working on observations from the Extended Ellett Line, a repeat hydrographic transect between Scotland and Iceland. Back in Hamburg, she continued investigating the hydrographic variability along the Extended Ellett Line for her Master’s thesis, using a data assimilation experiment in a coupled climate model.