Patricia Hunt

programme. Unlike THOR, which exclusively dealt with the observation and modelling of the ocean and climate, NACLIM, which is also chaired by Detlef Quadfasel at Hamburg, aims to link this research to marine biology. “Biology lags far behind the physical sciences when it comes to mechanistic understanding and prediction,” says Payne. “Even if we could characterise the ocean perfectly in infinite detail for the next 20 years, we couldn’t translate this into reliable biological predictions. This is the gap that we hope to start to bridge in NACLIM. We don’t expect to solve the problem — people have been trying to understand this problem for more than 100 years, and haven’t had much success so far — but what we do aim to do is to make the first steps in this direction, and map out the road ahead.” The blue whiting, for which the connections between physical oceanography and population ecology have already been studied in some detail, will also be the focus of Payne’s work within the NACLIM project. In the long term, researchers hope to be able to predict the effect of physical changes on fisheries, providing information that would also be very useful economically.