Ocean Environment Scientist - Oceanography and Ice

Ocean Environment Scientist – Oceanography & Ice

Job summary
:
Our customers require professional advice and situational awareness support, providing information about the marine environment to assist in their planning. The Ocean Environment Team within the Scientific Analysis Group acquires data from a variety of sources and analyses that data for subsequent use. The purpose of this post is to use environmental data and provide an assessment of the environmental conditions likely to be encountered.

The post holder will be the technical expert in their area of specialism, leading and supporting UKHO projects where appropriate.

Key responsibilities include four main areas:

• Development
  :
  Develop capabilities that improve the customer’s tactical exploitation of the Ocean Environment, including understanding customer needs, obtaining user feedback, and delivering new capabilities through projects.
• Data analysis and presentation
  :
  Obtain and analyse data to create representative descriptions of the environment for situational awareness, deriving visualisations and improving analysis methodology.
• Capability
  :
  Liaise with UK and overseas organisations to meet work needs, keep abreast of developments in marine environmental data and techniques, arrange data acquisition, and develop a network of contacts within academic and government communities to facilitate collaboration.
• Report writing and quality assurance
  :
  Produce technical reports that record methodology and results, present cases for changes to working practices, and ensure documentation is maintained for all analysis work.

Working conditions

• Attendance in office required in accordance with business need – likely 50% of working time.
• Opportunity for part‑time hours; minimum 30 hours per week.
• SC clearance required with potential for development to Developed Vetting clearance in the future.

• A postgraduate qualification and experience of working in marine science or a related discipline.
• Strong numerical ability and a deep understanding of the principles of marine environmental science.
• Deep working knowledge of data analysis and visualisation techniques applied to marine environmental data, including programming skills (MATLAB, R, BASH or Python).
• Recent experience working with commonly used data formats within the marine sciences, such as gridded NetCDF, CSV, GeoTIFF and shape files.
• A good understanding of data presentation and visualisation techniques and experience applying them to marine environmental data.
• Experience of working independently on scientific projects and making evidence‑based decisions.
• Excellent communication skills at all levels, both written and oral, including the ability to undertake scientific literature reviews, extract relevant information and summarise for a non‑expert audience.

To be successful in the role, you will need confidence in your technical capability to undertake innovative approaches to complex tasks, and the ability to provide feedback, guidance and coaching in an inclusive and nurturing way.

For more information and  the UK Hydrographic Office page on