Parametrising wakes for oceanographic models

Project Description:

This PhD scholarship is offered by the EPSRC CDT in Offshore Wind Energy Sustainability and Resilience; a partnership between the Universities of Durham, Hull, Loughborough and Sheffield. This project is supported by Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS) and The National Oceanography Centre (NOC) . The successful applicant will undertake six-months of training with the rest of the CDT cohort at the University of Hull before continuing their PhD research at Loughborough University. 

The offshore wind sector is rapidly expanding to meet net-zero energy demands. Individual turbines and farms are getting larger and further from shore, with individual turbines spanning 240 m in diameter and farms reaching 600 km2. Forced by spatial constraints and enabled by floating technology, farms are now developing in deeper waters, occupying increasingly vast areas.

Oceanographic flow processes are highly sensitive to sea surface boundary conditions (Christiansen et al., 2022), which are in turn critically dependent on atmospheric forcing. Atmospheric flows past offshore wind turbines produce highly turbulent and extensive wakes. These wakes are a necessary result of energy extraction from the wind. They are a key motivation for spatial planning of offshore wind farms where turbine placement is optimised for maximum energy extraction while minimising costs associated with infrastructure and spatial footprint (Giebel et al., 2016). The turbulent wakes propagate downstream, leading to wake-wake interactions and farm-scale atmospheric flow processes with a significantly reduced wind speed in the lee of an offshore wind farm (Platis et al., 2018).

It has been recently shown that such large-scale atmospheric interactions can have a significant effect on sea-surface conditions, manifested through a locally reduced wind shear stress (Christiansen et al., 2022). Large-scale deployment of offshore wind farms in shelf seas therefore poses an emerging oceanographic problem; shelf seas are vital for life both on and below water through their control on the vertical transport of nutrients, and their role as a key component of the biogeochemical cycle (van Berkel et al., 2020). These are crucially dependent on general circulation and water column structure, which are both highly sensitive to conditions at the sea surface (Dorrell et al., 2022). Yet the impact of offshore wind expansion on sea surface conditions and subsequent regional scale effects is poorly understood and has only recently gained research interest. While wake parameterisations for atmospheric models have received significant interest over the last decade, the current state-of-the-art oceanographic models make sweeping assumptions regarding the form of sea-surface forcing, particularly concerning wake-wake interactions, spatial variability, and turbulent modifications (Christiansen et al., 2022). These limitations must be overcome for accurate prediction of oceanographic responses to offshore wind expansion.

This project aims to advance sea-surface parameterisations of atmospheric offshore wind farm wakes for use in oceanographic models, directly supported by the National Oceanography Centre, using the North-West European Shelf FVCOM model. This aim will be realised through the following objectives:

• Review literature and gather existing datasets required for model development and validation,
• Carry out simulations of atmospheric wind wakes using Computational Fluid Dynamics,
• Develop and validate sea-surface wind turbine wake parameterisations,
• Explore the potential impacts of current and future offshore wind development on North Sea oceanography, using FVCOM.

Completion of these objectives will deliver a functional oceanographic model for future research into impacts of offshore wind deployment to inform marine spatial planning.

Industry support

Training & Skills

You will benefit from a taught programme, giving you a broad understanding of the breadth and depth of current and emerging offshore wind sector needs. This begins with an intensive six-month programme at the University of Hull for the new student intake, drawing on the expertise and facilities of all four academic partners. It is supplemented by Continuing Professional Development (CPD), which is embedded throughout your 4-year research scholarship.

You will undertake two three-week placements at NOC during the PhD programme to provide support with FVCOM. The first placement will occur at the start of year 2 where the basics of FVCOM will be taught. The second placement will occur at the start of year 3 to learn how to set up and validate FVCOM simulations, and implement parameterisations.  Additional placement opportunities will be available with the physical oceanography team at CEFAS, to further embed PhD work within industry. Beyond academia, this PhD project will open pathways to a career in physical oceanography, the wind energy sector, or more broadly a career using computational fluid dynamics or data science.

Entry requirements

If you have received a First-class Honours degree, or a 2:1 Honours degree and a Masters, or a Distinction at Masters level with any undergraduate degree (or the international equivalents) in engineering, environmental science, mathematics and statistics or physics, we would like to hear from you. The ideal candidate for this project will have studied fluid mechanics/physical oceanography to a high level as part of their undergraduate degree.

If your first language is not English, or you require Tier 4 student visa to study, you will be required to provide evidence of your English language proficiency level that meets the requirements of the Aura CDT’s academic partners. This course requires academic IELTS 7.0 overall, with no less than 6.0 in each skill.

If you have any queries about this project, please contact Dr Charlie Lloyd via c.j.lloyd@lboro.ac.uk. You may also address enquiries about the CDT to auracdt@hull.ac.uk

Watch our short video to hear from Aura CDT students, academics and industry partners:

Funding

The CDT is funded by the EPSRC, allowing us to provide scholarships that cover fees plus a stipend set at the UKRI nationally agreed rates. These have been set by UKRI as £20,780 per annum at 2025/26 rates and will increase in line with the EPSRC guidelines for the subsequent years (subject to progress).

Eligibility

Research Council funding for postgraduate research has residence requirements. Our CDT scholarships are available to Home (UK) Students. To be considered a Home student, and therefore eligible for a full award, a student must have no restrictions on how long they can stay in the UK and have been ordinarily resident in the UK for at least 3 years prior to the start of the scholarship (with some further constraint regarding residence for education). For full eligibility information, please refer to the EPSRC website.

We also allocate a number of scholarships for International Students per cohort.

Guaranteed Interview Scheme

The CDT is committed to generating a diverse and inclusive training programme and is looking to attract applicants from all backgrounds. We offer a Guaranteed Interview Scheme for home fee status candidates who identify as Black or Black mixed or Asian or Asian mixed if they meet the programme entry requirements. This positive action is to support recruitment of these under-represented ethnic groups to our programme and is an opt in process.

Find out more

How to apply

Applications are open until 5 January 2026.

Please note, you may only apply for ONE project offered through the EPSRC CDT in Offshore Wind Energy Sustainability and Resilience.

Please ensure that you familiarise yourself with the Aura CDT website before you apply to give you a good understanding of what a CDT is, our CDT’s research focus and the training and continuing professional development programme that runs alongside the CDT. The Frequently asked questions page and Candidate resources page are essential reading prior to applying.

Applications are made via the Loughborough University admissions system. If you have not applied to Loughborough University before, you will need to set up an account to enable you to track the progress of your application and upload supporting documents.

As part of the recruitment process, we ask that you submit a short film of you delivering a presentation, of up to 5 minutes in length, on “How do your experiences and qualities provide a background to contribute to research and innovation for the project you have applied for”.

You will be assessed on the content of your presentation, not your film editing skills, but please be mindful of filming in an appropriate, quiet location. Please film the presentation in whatever way you feel most comfortable with. For example, it could be a slide presentation with voice over, or you may wish to present simply talking to the camera.  Please use the tools and technology that are accessible to you and that you feel comfortable with e.g. your mobile phone, or the built-in ‘Record Slide Show’ on Keynote (macOS, iOS, iPadOS) or Powerpoint etc.

We also ask that you complete a Supplementary Application Form. This includes space for you to provide a link where the shortlisting panel may view your film.

Follow this link to apply for CDT projects at Loughborough University: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/apply/research-applications/

Under programme name, select ‘Civil Engineering Offshore Wind Energy Sustainability and Resilience’. Both Full-time and Part-time modes of study are available (part-time study is only available to Home students due to visa restrictions). Please quote the advertised reference number in your application: this is Aura26-CL for “Parametrising wakes for oceanographic models”.

With your application, you need to upload copies of the following supporting evidence:

• Complete transcripts (and final degree certificate(s) where possible). If your qualification documents are not in English, you will need to supply copies of your original language documents as well as their official translation into English.
• Your Curriculum Vitae (CV).
• A completed Supplementary Application Form (upload when asked to add a Research proposal).

Uploading the form 

When you have completed the form, please save it as a pdf format and labelled as follows:

Last name_first name PhD application form

Upload the form as part of your application documents through the University of Hull student application portal, when asked to add a Research Proposal. The Form replaces the Research Proposal and so you do not need to add a Research Proposal. Please do not send your form directly to the Offshore Wind CDT.

Interviews

First-round interviews will be held online during early to mid-February 2026. The interview panel will comprise the project supervisory team members from the host university where the project is based, plus a representative of the CDT.  Where the project involves external supervisors from university partners or industry sponsors then representatives from these partners may form part of the interview panel and your application documents will be shared with them (with the guaranteed interview scheme section of the supplementary application form removed).

If you are successful, you will progress to a second interview towards the end of February 2026. This will be with key academics from the CDT from across our four partner institutions (Durham University, University of Hull, Loughborough University, University of Sheffield) and your application documents will be shared with them (with the guaranteed interview scheme section removed from the supplementary application form).

If you have any queries about this project, please contact Dr Charlie Lloyd via c.j.lloyd@lboro.ac.uk. You may also address enquiries about the CDT to auracdt@hull.ac.uk

References

• van Berkel J., Burchard H., Christensen A., Mortensen L.O., Petersen O.S. and Thomsen F., 2020. The effects of offshore wind farms on hydrodynamics and implications for fishes. Oceanography 33(4), pp.108-117.
• Dorrell R.M., Lloyd C.J., Lincoln B.J., Rippeth T.P., Taylor J.R., Caulfield C.C.P., Sharples J., Polton J.A., Scannell B.D., Greaves D.M. and Hall R.A., 2022. Anthropogenic mixing in seasonally stratified shelf seas by offshore wind farm infrastructure. Frontiers in Marine Science (9), pp.830927.
• Platis, A., Siedersleben, S. K., Bange, J., Lampert, A., Bärfuss, K., Hankers, R., … & Emeis, S. (2018). First in situ evidence of wakes in the far field behind offshore wind farms. Scientific reports, 8(1), 2163
• Giebel, G., & Hasager, C. B. (2016). An overview of offshore wind farm design. MARE-WINT: New materials and reliability in offshore wind turbine technology, 337-346.
• Christiansen N., Daewel U., Djath B., Schrum C., 2022, Emergence of Large-Scale Hydrodynamic Structures Due to atmospheric Offshore Wind Farm Wakes, Frontiers in Marine Science (9)