Vicki Barker wins Tech Award | Christ Church, Oxford

Christ Church undergraduate Vicki Barker has won the SET Maritime Technology Award for her 4th Year Project

At the 2008 Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards, the Lloyds Register Educational Trust Award for the Best Maritime Technology Student went to Vicki Barker of Christ Church and the Department of Engineering Science for her 4th year undergraduate project studying extreme waves off Norway.

Her project looked at predicting extreme waves (the 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 year) at a point off the coast off Norway and found a strong link between the local wave climate and the long-term variation of the average atmospheric pressure difference north-south in the Atlantic over each winter. Given that barometric data has been recorded in Iceland and the Azores continuously since the early 19th century, Vicki was able to infer the long-term variations in the wave climate off Norway over the past 200 years. Such results are important in assessing the possible implications of climate change for design against extreme waves in offshore and coastal engineering.

The project was run in co-operation with BP and supervised by Prof. Paul Taylor, whose research interests include ocean waves and wave-structure interaction in offshore and coastal engineering.