Dougal is a coastal oceanographer based at NOC in Liverpool working on the observation of water level, hydrodynamics and sediment dynamics. His interests are in remote sensing, cohesive sediment dynamics and bedforms, tidal flats and coastal engineering.
Previous work at Marine Scotland, as part of the Oceanography Group, included extensive survey work in Scottish waters, running near real-time systems for data collection and the management of the resulting data. This experience has come in useful in helping to construct GPS-Iridium tracked drifters for the SOLSTICE project and as a member of fieldwork teams for the COHBED and BLUEcoast projects. Current work includes validating SWOT 2D satellite altimetry in the coastal zone, and nearshore hydrodynamics and sediment dynamics for exchange across the sediment-water interface.
Key topics
- Satellite altimetry
- Small-scale hydrodynamics
- Sediment dynamics
- Tidal flats
- Oceanographic instrumentation
Coastal oceanographer within the Marine Physics and Ocean Climate group & Coastal Ocean Processes sub-group.
Communications working group.
SPLASH: building a coastal overtopping warning tool using in situ measurements, satellite earth observation and data machine learning.
SWOT-UK: The UK contribution to validating SWOT in the Bristol Channel and River Severn, with application to coastal and river management (https://noc.ac.uk/projects/swot-uk. NERC, NE/V009168/1, and UK Space Agency)
NutSed: exchange of nutrients across the sediment-water interface.
BLUEcoast: Improving our understanding of processes controlling the dynamics of our coastal systems (https://projects.noc.ac.uk/bluecoast. NERC, NE/N015894/1)
LOCATE: Land-Ocean Carbon Transfer (https://locate.ac.uk/)
Commonwealth Marine Economies (CME) Programme - Belize (https://cmeprogramme.org/)
Marine Autonomous Systems in Support of Marine Observations (MASSMO), 4 and 5b (https://projects.noc.ac.uk/massmo/)
SOLSTICE: Sustainable Oceans, Livelihoods and food Security Through Increased Capacity in Ecosystem research in the Western Indian Ocean (https://www.solstice-wio.org)
COHBED: Realistic Sedimentary Bedform Prediction: Incorporating Physical and Biological Cohesion (NERC, NE/I027223/1).