The team has a portfolio of projects that span environmental management through to assisting the Australian Defence Force. Our core expertise lies in coastal modelling and observations; including sediment transport, hydrodynamics, biogeochemistry, ocean optics and data assimilation.

The CEM team has developed over twenty years of research and applications in Australian and International coastal waters. The capability resides both in an experienced research team, and in a modelling platform, the coastal Environmental Modelling Suite, or EMS. A strength of this research effort has been that the advances in scientific understanding and knowledge acquired through a large number of individual research projects and applications have been captured and reflected in improvements to the modelling platform, resulting in a highly versatile and capable tool.

This website provides information about both the modelling platform EMS, previous and ongoing projects and the research team. EMS consists of a set of component models which can be used separately or together. The hydrodynamic model SHOC provides a versatile tool for predicting 3-dimensional advection, mixing and tracer transport in coastal systems. The sediment model adds a layered bed sediment, and represents the physical exchange of particulate and dissolved tracers between the water column and the bed. The biogeochemical module provides a sophisticated representation of the cycling of carbon and nutrients through coupled pelagic-benthic ecosystems.

The research team is composed of a set of experienced research scientists, who bring deep specialist knowledge and experience of the processes underlying each of these modules, but also have enough shared experience of coastal systems to deal with the interactions among them.