MAST
Modelling for Aquatic Systems, one of my greatest achievements, is my research team at the University of Liège.
MAST stands for Modelling for Aquatic Systems. It’s the research group I founded at our University. We build numerical models of the ocean to understand it, forecast it and help manage it: a talented team of modellers, oceanographers and data scientists who predict the state of the sea the way weather centres predict the atmosphere.
The heart of our work is the coupling of ocean physics with the chemistry and biology it carries. We develop BAMHBI, a biogeochemical model born in the Black Sea and built for oxygen-poor waters, and with it we produce the Black Sea biogeochemical forecasts and reanalyses of the European Copernicus Marine Service.
Around that core, our research runs in four directions. We study marine deoxygenation and what it does to ecosystems and to the cycles of carbon and nutrients. We work on data assimilation and stochastic forecasting, so that a prediction always comes with an honest measure of its own uncertainty, and increasingly we train machine-learning emulators alongside the physics. We extend our models towards the full Earth system, from rivers and estuaries to the open sea and the sediments. And we connect all of it to what the ocean gives people, from functional biodiversity to a sustainable blue economy.
Little of this could be done alone, and none of it in one discipline. The group lives inside European and international projects, from Horizon Europe to ESA and the UN Ocean Decade, and its results feed the expert groups and assessments where ocean science meets policy.
See MAST ULiège page.
