About
Welcome to the NOC Near-Present Day Hackathon
The National Oceanography Centre Near-Present Day Hackathon is a two-day hackathon event taking place on 19th - 20th January 2026.
We will introduce the NOC Near-Present Day (NPD) ocean sea-ice model hierarchy and help researchers & students get hands-on with the data.
This will be a hybrid event, supporting in-person participation at NOCS (Southampton) & online via Microsoft Teams.
Registration for participants opens in January (w/c 5th January 2026).
What is a Hackathon?
A science hackathon is an event where diverse groups collaborate to address complex scientific problems and identify new research opportunities.
Participants typically work in teams to rapidly analyse scientific data and learn new skills in a focused environment, usually lasting from 1-5 days.
The NOC NPD Hackathon event will include tutorials covering...
- Accessing NPD model outputs via the cloud using the OceanDataStore.
- Analyse NEMO ocea sea-ice model outputs using the open-source NEMO Cookbook Python package.
...and hands-on analysis sessions centered around three Science Themes:
- Recent Arctic & Antarctic Sea Ice Changes.
- Atlantic Overturning in a Changing Climate.
- Ocean Heat Uptake and Marine Extremes.
What is the Near-Present Day ocean sea-ice hierarchy?
As part of the Atlantic Climate and Environment Strategic Science (AtlantiS) project, the National Oceanography Centre is developing a full suite of global ocean model configurations to perform multi-decadal Near-Present-Day (NPD) simulations.
Our aim is that the NPD simulations will be kept up to date with a 1-3 month lag.
The NPD hierarchy consists of three ocean sea-ice configurations of NEMO v4.2 at 1\(^{\circ}\), 1/4\(^{\circ}\) and 1/12\(^{\circ}\) nominal horizontal resolution.
The NPD version 1 simulations have been perfomed using a climatologically adjusted version of the ERA-5 atmospheric reanalysis (Hersbach et al., 2020). A climatological adjustment is applied to the ERA-5 hourly 2 m temperature field over regions where (ERA-5) sea ice cover > 0% to account for the well established Surface Air Temperature bias at high-latitudes (Tjernström & Graversen, 2009; Zampieri et al., 2023).
For more details on each of the configurations, see the Near-Present-Day Documentation here.
Contributors
- Ollie Tooth (oliver.tooth@noc.ac.uk) - Organiser
- Adam Blaker (atb299@noc.ac.uk) - Organiser
- Colin Sauze (colin.sauze@noc.ac.uk) - Research Software Engineer Support
- Esther Turner (esther.turner@noc.ac.uk) - Research Software Engineer Support