The west coast of southern Africa, a rich fishing ground and one of our planet's most productive upwelling zones, is prone to abnormal events that affect not only the living marine resources, but also offshore activities such as mining or gas exploration. Examples of unusual events include the intrusion of low oxygen waters from the tropics, and the occurrence of Benguela Niño in the eastern South Atlantic.  Some aspects of these phenomena can be monitored remotely, by means of satellites; others require a monitoring network. Numerical models of coastal oceanic conditions are essential tools for integrating the diverse measurements. 

The south-western coast of Africa, Angola, Namibia and South Africa have several distinctive upwelling zones because of differences in the coastlines, local winds, and topography of the ocean floor. All are affected by changes in the conditions along the equator. Hence physical, chemical and biological conditions are being monitored in each of these regions using oceanographic vessels for regular off-shore sections, satellite for measurements of variables such as sea surface temperature and chlorophyll, and unattended instrumented moorings for time-series measurements at a few key locations.   

The observational network is designed in collaboration with computer modellers of the oceans. The models must have extremely high spatial resolution because the phenomena associated with coastal upwelling have small spatial scales. As a result, models of two types are necessary: limited region, coastal models with very high resolution and open boundary conditions; and a relatively coarse resolution global model that provides boundary conditions for the regional model.

The regional coastal model is being developed in such a manner that it can easily be configured for any coastal zones (of other African or South American countries for example) by merely changing parameters such as the coastal geometry. The global model serves several purposes, those of coastal oceanographers, of climate modellers studying seasonal and inter-annual fluctuations, and of bio-geochemists exploring large scale features of the Atlantic and IndianOceans and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.