STUOD: Predicting the Oceans in a Warming World

STUOD, short for Stochastic Transport in Upper Ocean Dynamics, is a six-year collaboration funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant, launched in 2020. At its heart, the project aims to understand what’s happening in the upper ocean: the part of the ocean that interacts most directly with the atmosphere, marine life, and human activity.

The project is led by four Principal Investigators: Dan Crisan, Darryl Holm, Bertrand Chapron, and Etienne Memin, working across Imperial College London, Inria, and Ifremer.

The ocean is a turbulent, complex system. There are swirling eddies, temperature gradients, wave patterns, and currents happening at scales that are difficult to fully resolve in computer models – but can still be observed from satellites, drifters, and floats. STUOD builds mathematical models that incorporate this unpredictability, using a technique called stochastic modelling, which introduces controlled randomness into the equations to better capture real-world variability.

This allows the team to better predict how heat, salt, carbon, and other tracers move through the ocean. These improvements are important for understanding sea-level rise, tracking pollution such as oil and plastics, monitoring ocean acidification, and supporting more efficient maritime operations.

The STUOD team has made significant progress in recent years. Highlights include new advances in satellite data assimilation for sea surface height and temperature, developments in stochastic modelling for ocean dynamics, and improved simulations of processes at the ocean–atmosphere interface. The project has also published extensively and hosted its annual workshop and summer school, training the next generation of ocean scientists.

As STUOD enters its final phase, the team is focusing on applying these methods to real-world data – including satellite observations of surface ocean topography – to build a more accurate picture of the ocean. By improving how we model the upper ocean, STUOD is helping us better understand a part of the Earth system that affects us all.