Dr Ana Barbosa Aguiar

Areas of expertise

• Global Ocean Forecasting (FOAM = NEMO + CICE + NEMOVAR)
• Meddies and Mediterranean Outflow
• Azores Current System
• Polar Vortices and Barotropic Instability
• GFD Laboratory experiments

Publications by Ana Barbosa Aguiar

Current activities

Ana leads the Ocean Modelling team, in the “Ocean, Cryosphere and Dangerous Climate Change” group based within the Met Office Hadley Centre.  

The Ocean Modelling team focusses on development and assessment of ocean model configurations for the Global Ocean (coupled to global Sea Ice, GOSI) and coastal ocean (CO) North-west European shelf seas. These global and coastal ocean configurations are the ocean model component of the Met Office atmosphere/land/ocean/sea ice coupled prediction systems, used for forecasting across all time scales from hours to seasons as well as for climate projections within all the Met Office/Hadley Centre physical models and the UK Earth System Model. Our work is done in partnership with the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) as part of the Joint Marine Modelling Programme (JMMP). We are members of the NEMO consortium.

Career background

Ana became the Scientific Manager of the Ocean Modelling team in late 2023. Before that, Ana worked as an Ocean Modelling Scientist and owner of the Forecast Ocean Assimilation Model (FOAM) operational system, testing developments and operational upgrades to FOAM, as well as providing support to users of FOAM products. Ana took that role in the Global Ocean Forecasting team, within the “Ocean Forecasting Research and Development” group.

Prior to joining the Met Office, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de Physique des Oceans - CNRS/Ifremer (2014-2015), and at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (2008-2013). In France, she did some research on the signature Meddies in seismic imaging using a high-resolution numerical simulations (NHOES). While in Portugal, she studied Meddies and the Mediterranean Outflow using a regional ocean model (ROMS) for the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula; prior to that she did an observational study of the Azores Current based on drifters and altimetry data.

Ana completed her DPhil (2008) in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics at the University of Oxford where she ran laboratory experiments to investigate the batropic instability of detached shear layers in a rotating fluid - this led to a publication on Saturn's North Polar Hexagon.

As an undergraduate, Ana studied Physics and Applied Mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto.