AIR Centre researcher presents world-first Internal Waves Service at Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026

Adriana Ferreira, from the AIR Centre’s Data Science, Cloud Infrastructure, and Development team, presented yesterday, February 24, at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026 in Glasgow. Her talk introduced the Internal Waves Service (IWS), the world’s first global, near-real-time, open platform for detecting, mapping, and archiving oceanic internal solitary waves.

The presentation took place within the session “Cutting-Edge Artificial Intelligence for Oceanographic Monitoring, Modeling, Forecasting, and Marine Knowledge Generation II,” one of the meeting’s flagship tracks dedicated to artificial intelligence applications in ocean science.

Oceanic internal solitary waves play a key role in ocean mixing, climate regulation, and nutrient transport, yet their observation has historically been fragmented and labour-intensive. The Internal Waves Service addresses this challenge by scanning the global ocean daily using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery combined with an AI-driven classifier to automatically detect internal wave signatures and compile them into an open, searchable dataset. An expert validation interface supports continuous performance improvement, while the system’s planetary-scale coverage, developed in collaboration with more than twenty international partner institutions, enables for the first time a comprehensive assessment of both the presence and absence of internal waves, reducing long-standing publication biases. The result is a new operational data infrastructure supporting climate research, oceanography, and ecosystem modelling, with direct applications for offshore industries and marine navigation.

The Ocean Sciences Meeting is the largest global gathering of ocean scientists, jointly organised by the American Geophysical Union, the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, and The Oceanography Society. Bringing together leading scientists, policymakers, and industry representatives from around the world, the event provides a strategic platform to showcase the AIR Centre’s research and position the Internal Waves Service as a reference infrastructure at the intersection of artificial intelligence and ocean science.