Applying e-science to evaluating antarctic lakes as indicators of climate change

Project aim

E-science is an exciting new branch of inter-disciplinary science which effectively uses powerful computers, high speed networks and sophisticated visualisation techniques to address important questions. It allows scientists to access large metadata bases via the internet to produce complex models or visualisations. This proposal will assess the potential of Antarctic lakes as indicators of climate change. For example we could produce a three dimensional picture of the light climate in the water column of a lake and show how this will change as ice-cover thins, becomes opaque and breaks out. In turn this could be used to produce a detailed picture of how photosynthesis will respond to changing light climate, which in turn impacts on carbon cycling. This proposal involves five senior scientists from a range of disciplines including a polar limnologist, an environmental modeller, a remote sensing engineer and computer/IT scientists who are the forefront of the E-Science initiative.