Jerry Blackford is the Head of Science for PML’s Marine Systems Modelling Group, whose ~16 scientists develop coupled ecosystem, biogeochemical and physical model systems addressing a variety of applied research questions from coastal to global scales.
Jerry has a 26 year career specialising in marine system modelling being involved in the development and application of ERSEM since its conception in 1991. In recent years he has been particularly concerned with the interaction of high CO2 with marine systems, in the context of Climate Change and Ocean Acidification as well as leading environmental risk assessment and monitoring research for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
He has been actively researching CCS since 2004, in a wide range of projects, including as a work package leader in the EU funded RISCS and ECO2 programmes and as Principle Investigator in the UK funded QICS project which developed a world-first release of CO2 into shallow marine sediments. He is a work package and institute lead for the recently funded STEMM-CCS Horizons 2020 project, focused on operational monitoring for offshore CCS. He has links with several international researchers in the field of CCS, including Japan, Australia and the US, as well as within Europe.
Concerning Climate and Ocean Acidification he has pioneered the development of local and regional scale projections, including impacts and feedbacks to ecosystems, leading a NERC-Defra funded project investigating the evolution of ocean acidification in shelf seas and publishing in Nature Climate Change. He advises and contributes to the International Ocean Acidification Research Users Advisory Group, based in Monaco.
More generally he is involved in developing marine system models for a wide range of applications, including in the BBSRC-NERC funded ROSA Aquaculture project and the NERC funded Shelf Seas Biogeochemistry program. He has published over 50 articles with in excess of 1400 citations (85 / 2000 according to Researchgate!).