2026 Meeting of the Waves SIG

The 7th meeting of the Challenger Society Ocean Wind Waves Special Interest Group met on Tuesday 23rd June 2026 in Imperial College, London. The meeting was hosted in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Building, South Kensington and included a visit to the hydrodynamics laboratory.

Despite the heatwave, and temperatures in London exceeding 30°C we were joined by 25 participants in person. A further 31 joined online, with representatives from academia (58%), government (11%), research centres (13%) and industry (18%)

We had 14 presentations from scientists working on wave physics, forecasting and hindcasting. The latest updates to ERA 6 Reanalysis were shared, as well as global wave observations from ESA Sea State Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project. Historic and future climate predictions, new datasets and parameterisations were also shared. We heard about novel techniques to track wave breaking and learnt about impacts of surface waves on air-sea gas transfer and Lagrangian particle transport.

There was an Interactive Laboratory Session at the Hydrodynamics Laboratory, including active show-and-tell around ongoing experimental facilities. Local PhD students and lab director Ioannis Karmpadakis gave a tour the Deep Water Basin, Coastal Flume, and Double-Ended Wind–Wave Flume. We got a lively discussion and a demonstration where we were asked to choose particular wave conditions to simulate. One visitor commented “I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but it really looked like the sea!”

I would like to thank Ioannis and his team for hosting us in Imperial College.

If you want to receive information about future events, please contact Dr Lucy Bricheno (luic@noc.ac.uk) to be added to the mailing list.

More details of our special interest group here: https://projects.noc.ac.uk/windwavesSIG

All the talks and a report from this, and previous meetings of the waves SIG are now available online here: https://projects.noc.ac.uk/windwavesSIG/meetings