Babes-Bolyai University (UBB) of Cluj-Napoca is implementing a 1.4-million-euro project, funded under the National Resilience and Recovery Plan, on the essential interactions between oceans and the
atmosphere.

“Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (UBB) is implementing 11 projects funded under PNRR’s Component 9: Private Sector Support, Research, Development and Innovation, Initiative 8: ‘Development of a programme for attracting highly specialised human resources from abroad in research, development and innovation activities,” each of these projects having a funding of approximately 1.4 million euro, over a period of 3 years. One of the 11 projects, entitled ‘Nonlinear Studies of Stratified Oceanic and Atmospheric Flow,’ is coordinated by Dr Calin-Iulian Martin from the University of Vienna and addresses one of the most urgent needs of today, namely to obtain a thorough and comprehensive understanding of the large-scale ocean circulation and ocean-atmosphere interactions. This is because, with their remarkable capacity to store and release heat over
long periods of time, the oceans play an active and central role in climate stabilisation. In this context, the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that 93% of the additional energy resulting from the greenhouse effect has been absorbed by the ocean,” UBB informs in a press release.

According to the source, despite some progress in understanding ocean-atmosphere interactions, there are still many shortcomings, for instance the complicated vertical structure of ocean currents is largely
ignored, and so far only the irrotational case has been treated; the current stage of the theory is almost exclusively linear, which means that, so far, only situations which assume that the physical quantities
involved satisfy simple proportional relationships have been considered; geophysical effects (arising from the Earth’s rotation) are largely ignored; three-dimensional water flows are very poorly understood; atmospheric studies usually start from ad-hoc modelling based on heuristic simplifications of the equations of motion or on observational data.

The stated objectives will be achieved by using approximations that preserve the structure of the nonlinear governing equations, followed by the derivation of model equations that incorporate the long-wave regime as well as the intermediate-wave regime. As far as atmospheric wave propagation is concerned, a non-dimensionalisation procedure in the hybrid spherical-geopotential coordinate system will be used, using also recently derived methods for stratified flows.