Jenny Cocks

Profile

I’m a first year PhD student funded by the SENSE Earth Observation CDT and based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (NOCS). I graduated from the University of Southampton in 2015 with a bachelor’s in Oceanography, then worked as an Engineer for several years before beginning my PhD in 2021.

I’m studying the role of Anarctic sea ice in deep water formation in the Southern Ocean. Deep water formation is a key component of the global overturning circulation, drawing excess anthropogenic heat and carbon out of the atmosphere and ventilating the abyssal ocean. I’ll use satellite altimetry data and model outputs to better understand the ocean-ice-atmosphere interactions in the Southern Ocean, and how these translate to oceanic heat and carbon uptake. This is an area of uncertainty in the modelling underpinning the IPCC reports, where predictions do not always agree with the observational record. The aim of this project therefore is to better use the abundance of earth observation data and model outputs with data science and machine learning techniques to improve our predictive capability. 

My primary supervisor is Dr Alice Marzocchi, who is also based at NOCS.

Research interests

• Using satellite altimetry (CryoSat-2 and IceSat-2) to observe sea ice
• Using satellite altimetry to measure steric height
• Representation of deep water formation, sea ice and poynyas in CMIP6 models
• Exploiting big data and cloud-based computing

Qualifications

• BSc Oceanography