Surfing, science and lost pāua
Moana Project PhD student Phellipe Couto is in the early stages of his research into the circulation patterns of water in the Kaikoura canyon. Phellipe wants to understand how deep ocean and coastal scale hydrodynamics interact so that material that is transported, particularly pāua can be assessed in this environment.
Currently living and working in Raglan, Phellipe is a Brazilian expat who came to New Zealand through his journey in oceanography - a field he entered due to his love of surfing and curiosity when out in the waves.
“I started surfing and being in the water and seeing the waves I began paying attention to the water dynamics and the surf swell. I wanted to understand these things better, so you could say that surfing really opened my eyes to oceanography.”
Photo taken at Arraial do Cabo, Rio de Janeiro. The area where the Brazilian Navy Marine Institute is based. Also the region of interest in Phellipe’s undergrad and masters studies, a region of active coastal upwelling.
Combined with a dream to live at the beach, Phellipe admits that the coastal universities also drew him to study the ocean. With an initial interest in physics and the hydrodynamic processes of the ocean, he then focused on topics that were applicable to day-to-day activities in the coastal ocean and ventured into the world of ocean modelling.
“Eventually, I began skilling myself in observational data analysis which is when you look at all the ocean data that is measured by buoys and current meters. By looking deeper into these data sets and using observations we can understand more about the ocean and its different environments.”
This type of information is vital given approximately 40% of the world's population living within 100 kilometres of the coast. Especially, as economic activity and population densities increase so does the pressure on these coastal ecosystems.
Phellipe spent some time with the Brazilian Navy as an undergraduate research trainee, where he got a deeper understanding of how different groups and communities rely on the ocean.
Photo taken offshore Paranagua Bay – Paraná, Brazil while checking the state of a MetOcean buoy maintained by the University of Rio de Janierio.
Followed by a masters in Rio de Janeiro, Phellipe then had the opportunity to come to New Zealand for an internship with MetOcean.
“I wanted to see how my academic skills could be used in real life. I was curious about what oceanographers were doing in New Zealand and I knew there was good surf there too - so it was a very exciting opportunity. Being exposed to what MetOcean does and their application of the science has been so valuable.”
Beginning at MetOcean as a coastal modeller, now, four years on Phellipe is an oceanographer turned PhD student and his interest and drive to learn have only increased.
“It wasn’t in my plans to begin a PhD. But in my role at MetOcean I realised that I like doing science research and digging further and exploring curiosities.”
And his PhD within the Moana Project encourages him to do exactly that. Researching the environment the Kaikoura Canyon provides, Phellipe is able to operate in a particularly unique ocean space.
Usually, a 200-metre depth in the ocean lies tens or hundreds of kilometres offshore and is characterised as the ‘deep ocean’ dropping off from the continental shelf. In the Kaikoura Canyon, there is a large slope in the ocean floor so that at only 5 kilometres from the shore, the water depth is 1000 metres which also provides a preferable environment for large marine mammals.
“That's why Kaikoura is a great place for whale spotting; the marine mammals get so close to shore because the deep ocean dynamics are very close to the coastal ocean. Combine that with lots of rivers flowing into the already nutrient rich water, it becomes even more productive for biological populations.”
Phellipe’s role in the Moana Project is to develop a hydrodynamic model which will define and characterise the multi-scale circulation patterns within the canyon and its surrounding area, to ultimately tell how it contributes to the transport of material from the coast to the deeper ocean.
With the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake drastically affecting this coastal area, and pāua populations were decimated. The movement of water in and around the canyon is an important factor for pāua population distributions, because the pāua larvae get moved around and transported somewhere else.
Phellipe’s PhD aims to provide the background knowledge of regional ocean circulation dynamics (the movement and patterns in the ocean that influence water circulation) so that other members of the Moana Project can better understand the effects of dispersion( the distribution of something over a wide area) and in turn inform pāua recovery strategies.
Phellipe working on the analysis of the large-scale ROMS Backbone model dataset for a region around the Kaikoura canyon.
“One of the main goals of the Moana Project is to have a better understanding of how ocean dynamics impact biological productivity, whether these species are transported to different places and how they connect, and my PhD will feed into that.”
Phellipe is part of the Nga Ripo o Te Moana team and his PhD is being supervised by Otago University professors Dr. Ata Suanda and Dr. Wayne Stephenson, and Moana Project Scientific Lead Dr João Marcos Souza.
Phellipe’s scientific journey has progressed immensely over the last few years, and when asked whether becoming an oceanographer has helped him with his surfing, he says yes!
“It helps for sure. All those things I feel in the water, now make more sense to me. When I feel the tides I associate them to oceanography. They are very complex systems, you might see a current happening at a very particular time but it's usually being influenced by several other factors. I guess that's kind of what happens in life as well, right?”
Follow Phellipe and the rest of the Moana Project team members and their progress here