BP Fund Put to Use for Local Research at TAMUCC
– September 8, 2011
CORPUS CHRISTI — Texas A&M Corpus Christi is one of just a handful of universities across the nation to receive funding for research from the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.
(From KRISTV.com / by Janine Reyes) — The $800,000 grant, established by BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, could provide valuable information we may one day put to use right here.
“The weather in Corpus Christi actually depends on really small scales,” explained Dr. Darek Bogucki, who will be leading the research. Dr. Bogucki hopes to find some answers with a three year, in-depth study.
“This is very exciting, its really not well known, in some sense it can be compared to the Sputnik moment, back then, times when we were going to the moon, not knowing what we were going to discover,” he said.
Those discoveries will come about through research, using undergraduate students. The learning will be hands on, for researchers and those in the classroom.
Right now, the school has a remote operating vehicle, but with grant funding, they aim to build a larger machine in the future. “Looking at the smallest features of the flow, as I mentioned, millimeters or smaller,” explained Bogucki.
Although that remote operating vehicle is just a prototype right now, once it hits the waters, it could provide some very groundbreaking data.
“This research will improve immediately, our ability to predict weather ahead, so the seven day forecast may become 10 day forecast,” Bogucki said.
It’s an exciting project for Bogucki to spearhead, and for students, it’s an amazing opportunity.
“The students who are very interested will be awarded with probably trips to conferences and presenting our research to the world at large,” Bogucki said.
The project will officially start next January. Doctor Bogucki says they’ll likely spend two years gathering data, and the final year imputing their findings.
“GoMRI In the news” is a reposting of articles about GoMRI-funded research (published by various news outlets). The author’s interpretations and opinions expressed in these articles is not necessarily that of GoMRI.
