Hub researcher Cynthia Bluteau awarded a postdoctoral fellowship

July 10, 2017

Dr Cynthia Bluteau, who is currently a Research Associate within the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering at UWA and an Associate Researcher in the Offshore Floating Facilities ITRH, has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). NSERC awards 180 postdoctoral fellowships each year to Canadian researchers with less than two years of post-doctoral research experience at the time of application. Applicants can apply only once and current success rates are about 30%. She is taking up her award in September 2017 at the Institut des Sciences de la mer (ISMER) in Rimouski, Quebec for two years.

Cynthia’s role within the ITRH Project 1 team (Metocean Hazards from Solitons) was to design and lead the oceanographic field work in the Browse Basin, which was recently completed in May 2017, as reported here. Her research expertise is in environmental fluid mechanics. In particular, Cynthia quantifies transport and mixing, under field conditions to assess the predictive relationships embedded in numerical models since these relationships are currently derived from idealized engineering flows or from controlled, weakly energetic, experiments.

Cynthia has recently developed new methods to quantify mixing more directly in energetic ocean flows. These techniques, applicable to ship-based and autonomous measurements, will be applied to existing and planned field observations within the ITRH Project 1. The intention is to develop (via a proposed Australian Research Council Discovery Proposal grant) a more universal relationship to describe the mixing efficiency and overturning length scales, two core quantities embedded within ocean models. These will in turn improve the predictive capability of numerical circulation models.

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