People
The sea-level group at the NIOZ Department of Estuarine and Delta Systems is based in Yerseke. We are part of the NIOZ sea-level centre of expertise.
In our group, we consider sea-level change as a big puzzle with lots of moving parts, and we are keen to understand how present-day climate change is driving each of the pieces. We include as many contributions as possible (oceans, ice, land, etc) and look both at the recent past (20th century) and at projecting future changes. We are interested in many facets of sea-level change, such as 1) projecting future regional sea-level changes 2) attributing sea level changes, and in particular the regional differences, to natural or human forcings 3) the impact and interaction of sea-level rise on the coast (ecological, physical, sociological processes), and 4) the closure of the 20th century sea-level budget.
Dr. Ir. Aimée Slangen (Group Lead)
In January 2017 I joined the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research as a Tenure Track researcher, in the Department of Estuarine & Delta Systems (EDS). As of July 2020 I am a tenured senior researcher in the same department. I am leading the NIOZ research on understanding and projecting (regional) sea-level change, and on translating sea-level change to the coastal/delta/estuarine environment. I like to take a broad approach and study both global and regional sea-level change in response to climate change. I am a founding member of the NIOZ Sea Level Centre. I did my PhD-research on regional sea-level modelling at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research in Utrecht (IMAU) with Roderik van de Wal and Bert Vermeersen (TU Delft), and defended my thesis in December 2012. I then moved to Tasmania for a 3-yr postdoc at CSIRO with John Church, followed by a 1-yr stint in the UK (but working for IMAU). I was a contributing author on IPCC AR5 Chapter 13, the work from my PhD formed the basis for Section 13.6: Regional Sea Level Change. I am a Lead Author on the IPCC AR6 report, Chapter 9 (Oceans, Cryosphere and Sea Level), and Contributing author to the SPM and Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 12. You can find a list of my projects and functions here, and my outreach activities here.
Dr. Victor Malagon Santos (Postdoc, April 2021-present)
I defended my PhD thesis in March 2021 and soon afterwards I joined the EDS department at NIOZ-Yerseke as a Postdoc. The research I will be performing at NIOZ is part of a large collaborative project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020, the so-called PROTECT project. The overarching aim of PROTECT is to project changes in the land-based cryosphere to produce global and regional projections of sea-level rise (SLR) and assess associated impacts to support coastal adaptation planning policies. Our role in PROTECT is to investigate SLR using different statistical frameworks and outputs from state-of-the-art ice sheet and glacier models (produced within PROTECT) to design global and regional SLR projections up to 2100 and to 2500, accounting for all SLR components. I graduated from my PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Central Florida (USA) under the supervision of Thomas Wahl. My PhD research was focused on assessing multivariate extreme events in coastal regions, using a combination of numerical and statistical models. I received my MSc in Engineering in the Coastal Environment from the University of Southampton (UK) in 2016. I pursued my undergraduate studies at the University of Cadiz (Spain), specializing in Oceanography and Environmental Sciences.
Jeemijn Scheen, MSc (Postdoc, October 2022-present)
I am a physical oceanographer and joined the sea level group at NIOZ in October 2022. I am modeling sea level along the Dutch coast in high resolution with the ROMS model. My research is part of the HiRISE project, which aims to predict ice shelf stability and melt in Antarctica. These predicted scenarios, which have a different amount of ice melt with different timing and location, lead to scenarios for sea level rise that we can model along the Dutch coast. We will also model how sea-level extremes (storms, tides, waves, surges) behave in these scenarios and if they would be higher than coastal structures such as dikes. I did my studies at Utrecht University: bachelors in physics and mathematics followed by a master in theoretical physics. My MSc thesis was about black holes in string theory under supervision of Stefan Vandoren. I then worked 2 years at an electricity grid company on a.o. renewable energy, before coming back to academia. For my PhD, I was at the University of Bern, Switzerland, under supervision of Thomas Stocker. We investigated how strong the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, was in the last ice age by comparing model results with sediment cores (of protactinium and thorium) from the ocean floor.
Jaime de la Hoz Navarro, MSc (PhD Candidate, April 2024-present)
[more to be added]
Former group members
Dr. Carolina Camargo (PhD Candidate, Jan 2019-Feb 2023) I am an Oceanographer (graduated from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande – FURG, Brazil) and I am currently a PhD candidate at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, in the Department of Estuarine & Delta Systems. Before that, I got a master’s degree in marine and Lacustrine Science and Management, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Universiteit Antwerpen and Universiteit Gent. For my master thesis I worked with the quality control of in-situ sea level measurements from tide gauges, under the supervision of Francisco Hernandez (VLIZ) and Karline Soetaert (NIOZ). My PhD project is on the regional sea-level budget in the satellite era (1993-present). Sea level has been rising in the last century, however there is still a difference between the total observed sea-level rise and the sum of the different contributions. The reason why we are not able to explain the regional sea-level variations can be due to uncertainties in the reconstructions of past sea-level change. In this research, we aim to get a better understanding of the sea-level change and its contributing processes by using satellite data. Besides the sea level research, I’m also interested in the study of oceanic microturbulence.
Dr. Tim Hermans (PhD Candidate, Jan 2018 - July 2022) I
started as a PhD candidate at the Estuarine & Delta Systems
department in January 2018. Before starting with a PhD, I received my
masters degree in Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of
Technology in 2017. My master thesis with Wouter van der Wal focused on
the 3D numerical modelling of glacial isostatic adjustment in
Antarctica. My PhD at the NIOZ is about the high-resolution numerical
modelling of regional sea-level change in the European Shelf area.
Regional sea-level change can deviate strongly from global mean
sea-level change. In order to represent the true spatial variability of
sea-level change at coasts, deltas and estuaries, it is likely that we
need a higher resolution than the coarse resolutions of the climate
models that are currently being used to compute sea-level change
projections. The goal of my PhD is to compute sea-level rise projections
on a higher spatial resolution for the use of these projections closer
to the coast. Tim is now working as a Postdoc at IMAU, Utrecht University.