Hosted at POL

The Laboratory hosts a range of national and international services for the benefit of the wider community.

British Oceanographic Data Centre

The British Oceanographic Data Centre is a national facility archiving and distributing marine environment data for science, education, industry, and the public. It is part of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission's network of data centres.

National tidal and Sea Level Facility & Tide Gauge Network

The UK Tide Gauge Network monitors sea level and tides, and is part of POL's National Tidal and Sea Level Facility, which provides technical expertise and quality-controlled data with a range of practical and scientific applications - [More]

Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level

Since 1933, the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level has collected and published sea level data from an international network of tide gauges - [More]

Scientific partners

National Centre for Ocean Forecasting

The National Centre for Ocean Forecasting is a strategic partnership between the Met Office and the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, National Oceanography Centre Southampton, and Environmental Systems Science Centre at Reading.

Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean

POL is a member of the UK Consortium in the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean, which builds links among worldwide oceanographic institutions, to promote long term cooperation in comprehensive global-ocean observations.

Yokohama Declaration
In situ global ocean observations are an essential component of the earth observing system, to deliver a variety of products by a combination of existing and new programmes and platforms, for societal needs. POGO is uniquely positioned to contribute to the implementation of an ocean observing system.

POL's research

Oceans 2025 is addressing global change problems that involve the oceans. Starting in April 2007 this five-year NERC strategic marine research programme will improve our understanding of how the oceans behave, how they are responding to climate change and what impact this will have on society.

Seven UK marine centres (including POL), funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) designed Oceans 2025 as a cross-disciplinary partnership, coordinating their separate expertise. This approach to strategic marine science will be at the forefront of European and global research.

Out of the nine major science themes that Oceans 2025 addresses POL is undertaking research in six of them as outlined below:

Global sea level is expected to rise over the 21st century by between 20 and 60 cm, enough to produce large changes in the frequency of extreme flooding events unless expensive changes are made to coastal defences. In order to make informed decisions, good predictions of sea level change are needed, not just globally, but locally - [More]

Our coastal and shelf seas are vital for shipping, fisheries, aggregates, renewable energy, and leisure. At the same time our coastal environment receives waste water, nutrients and other farming and industrial contaminants. As a society heavily dependent on the services provided by our marine environment, we want to maintain the capacity of our seas for sustainably supplying us with its resources, without being harmed by our actions. The scale and complexity of the marine system means that we are becoming very dependent on computer models that can provide operational forecasts (e.g. the National Centre of Ocean Forecasting) and longer-term predictions (e.g. as our climate drifts) of how the environment responds to our demands - [More]

To achieve an 'ecosystems approach' for marine resource management, we need to disentangle human impacts from natural variability, over a range of temporal and spatial scales. This Theme combines physical modelling and trophic dynamics to re-assess past changes in marine ecosystems and predict their future development - [More]

New and continual measurements give new knowledge of the ocean. POL's focus here is on measurement systems for hitherto unresolved processes, securing the underpinning physics of predictive models, and communications (telemetry) to make data available in near-real-time, long-term, for monitoring and forecasting systems - [More]

Numerical models are a vital tool for developing our understanding of the Earth system and how it responds to natural and anthropogenic change. Such models must be able to efficiently represent the marine environment from the global ocean to shelf seas and estuaries, linking hydrodynamics and ecosystem processes with the accuracy to provide reliable short and long term predictions. Theme 9 will deliver the state-of-the-art models needed for the next decade of UK marine science - [More]

The marine environment is large in scale, highly dynamic and relatively inaccessible - requiring sustained observations to obtain meaningful information on environmental changes and their causes. This Theme is a NERC Category 1 activity that provides the infrastructure and scientific coordination to support many well-established marine time series and monitoring studies, together with others specifically designed to meet the needs of Oceans 2025 - [More]