Profile

An audio version of my profile is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6046854/IAS%202012%20-%20John%20Prytherch%20Profile.mp3 

The carbon dioxide (CO2) that humans are emitting from, for example, cars and electric power plants, is causing the world to warm. A large amount of the carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere ends up in the ocean.

I’m interested in how fast carbon dioxide moves from the air into the sea, and what things affect the speed of this exchange. Learning more about this will help to improve predictions of climate change.

In order to do this, my colleagues and I measure how fast the CO2 is moving between the atmosphere and the ocean. We also measure all the things we think affect the exchange, such as wind speed and wave breaking. We are especially interested in what happens during storms, where we think there is a lot of CO2 exchange due to the large waves, sea spray etc.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3khBfwrlQQ

Working at sea is a lot of fun, but most of the time at work I’m on dry land. I share an office with another scientist and I work closely with a small team of five people. We often meet up to discuss plans and ideas, but most of the time I work by myself.

Most of the work I do is at a computer, either writing computer code to look at the measurements we have made, or writing scientific papers to tell other people about what we have found out.

Sometimes I am very busy and have to work till late, but normally I have plenty of time to see friends for coffee and lunch breaks and of course, to check facebook 🙂

I would like to use the prize money to make a small, working model of one of our instruments: a wave-breaking spar buoy. The real-life spar buoy is about 5 metres tall, and we use it measure wave breaking at sea by measuring the change in an electrical property of the ocean: the capacitance.

The small model of the buoy would be placed in a wave tank and used to demonstrate how this instrument works. We have several open days when lots of children and adults visit the oceanography centre, and we also have exhibits at festivals, fairs and schools. The spar buoy would be used at all of these.