reflection

First journal article!

Well, sort of. My last post also listed two journal articles but I was a minor author on those, contributing a small part of the text and comments on the rest. This post is about my first article as lead author.

It’s called “Implementation of tidal turbines in MIKE 3 and Delft3D models of Pentland Firth & Orkney Waters”, and it describes work that myself and two groups at Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh Universities did a few years ago, near the start of my PhD. Lots of people have represented tidal turbines in regional-scale flow models, but most of them have used academic codes that industry and investors won’t trust, or have modified trusted code – which itself tends to undermine that trust. Our aim for this work was to look at how tidal energy extraction can best be represented in two widely-used commerical modelling suites, without modifying their code. We also did some actual modelling, by way of example, and the results of that have been passed on to others in the project to use for ecological work.

In a small way this was perhaps a baptism by fire, in that I had to pull together work and writing done by people far senior to myself, add my own work on top of each, and try to construct a single coherent publication. Perhaps partly for this reason, coupled with my own inexperience, it had a long journey through review… but it’s out there now, and I’m glad it’s done!

If you have a subscription to Ocean & Coastal Management you can read the published version here; otherwise the “accepted version” (without journal formatting) is available at this finely crafted link.

Posted by simon in Publications, Reflective

Endings and continuations

Today was my last day at my host university in Japan. I didn’t achieve everything that I hoped, but I did get some interesting results that I can do something with in the months ahead. Such, I suspect, is the summary of most research projects.

Six weeks here has been a short enough time that I still feel new, and still wish that I had a few more weeks available, to do more work and to explore the area further; but it’s also a long enough time that I’ve made some local friends, and will feel sorry to leave. This afternoon I walked home the long way, and I found myself taking special note of the sights and sounds along the route, trying to fix them in memory. This has been a short chapter in my life, but a chapter nonetheless.

Tomorrow I am putting work largely on hold and going on a two-week holiday around Japan. I’ll probably write a little bit about it as I do (for those who are really not interested in my holiday diaries, forgive me – I’ll return to more subject-focused topics in a fortnight’s time). After that it’s back to Scotland, and a return to the reality that I have a looming thesis submission deadline, meaning that while I do plan to further analyse and to write up what I’ve been doing in Fukuoka, I have to be very careful how much time I spend on it.

Posted by simon in Working in Japan