Dr Peter McComb: Managing Director, Oceanographer
Peter has many years experience as oceanographer and project manager on a wide range of projects for the offshore industry as well as coastal / ports and harbours. His background includes metocean design studies for major oil/gas developments, research on coastal and harbour processes, harbour wave penetration and long wave agitation studies. He continues to be involved in the design and implementation of field data acquisition programs.

Dr David Johnson: Technical Director, Oceanographer
David is the primary architect of the numerical tools developed by MetOcean Solutions. With a doctorate in modelling of coastal currents, he specialises in the development of models and information systems used for the prediction and study of ocean and coastal waves, currents, sediment transport and dispersion of materials. Dave is the main architect behind MetOcean’s proprietary numerical system and developed MetOceanView, specialised ports and offshore weather forecast platform, which is extended by Emergency Response Interface for oil spill trajectory. MetOceanView has been successfully employed by the industry and integrated for remote environments, delivered through a custom web based interface.

Dr Brett Beamsley: Senior Scientist, Oceanographer
Brett is an expert at metocean collection and analysis of environmental data, including marine instrumentation deployments, data processing, seabed surveys, numerical hydrodynamic modelling. He enjoys challenges, solving problems and has worked with wide range of environmental data development and process improvement projects that include GIS mapping with Ocean Energy Systems(previously IEA), where he was a contributing scientist analysing wave energy. He recently contributed and worked with a publisher to present weathermaps and wind rose diagrams for “New Zealand good beach guide for North Island”. Brett was also called upon as technical expert to support the Rena incident and modelled oil spill trajectory to assist response crew operations.

John Oldman: Senior Consultant
John has many years experience working in the coastal environment with previous roles as Coastal Scientist at NIWA, Senior Planner with the UK Environment Agency and Consultant with both ASR (NZ) and ABP (UK). His background includes data analysis and management, numerical modeling using a range of commercial and open source models, model quality assurance and project management. He has appeared as expert witness at numerous council and Environment Court hearings. His specialty is estuary processes, which has led to the modelling of many wastewater treatment plant discharges, predicting larval dispersion and quantifying sediment transport over multiple time scales. He has worked for a wide range of clients including regional councils, environment agencies, developers and port companies and has been involved in a significant number of multi-disciplinary research programmes.

Greg Pearson: Senior Meteorologist and Modeller
Greg specialises in atmospheric modelling and forecasting, as well as statistical techniques to improve model performance. From his previous role as Manager, Forecasting Research with New Zealand MetService, Greg has extensive experience building forecast systems for the energy and aviation industries, Americas Cup syndicates and the New Zealand National Weather Service. Greg is passionate about finding the optimal balance between physical and statistical modelling, to supply the most competitive forecasts to any given market. Working with Frank, their development projects include developing real-time forecast systems for the energy sector, building a statistical modelling framework, optimising and designing novel NWP configurations for the marine environment.

Frank Sonntag: Atmospheric Scientist, IT developer
Frank has outstanding skills in the design and development of operational forecast and hindcasting systems. With a Masters in Atmospheric Sciences, University of Bonn (Germany)where his thesis was on High vertical resolution climate simulations. His project highlights include developing of Weatherscape XT: a geographically distributed weather database for TV broadcasting, DeepThought, a Multi-model probabilistic model output statistics system developing real-time synchronisation method, database design and data ingestion. Frank also looks after IT infrastructure and data handling of MetOcean’s forecast and communications systems.

Dr Sébastien Delaux: Numerical Modeller
Sébastien came to MetOcean with several years of experience in fluid dynamics and the numerical simulation of environmental flows that he acquired at National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA), He was also an active developer of the Gerris Flow Solver, an open source Fluid Dynamics equation solver. Sébastien specialises in computational fluid mechanics, and has experience in the simulation of small to large scale environmental flows. He is currently developing an innovative software that incorporates state-of-the-art applied mathematics to account ship motion response to a wave field, for the purpose of navigational safety. His work will complement and integrate with the range of operational forecasting solutions that MetOcean presents.

Dr Alexandre Schimel: Acoustic Engineering Scientist
Alexandre has a Master in Engineering from ENSTA BRETAGNE (Brest, France) and a Ph.D. in Earth and Ocean Sciences from the University of Waikato, NZ. Specialising in underwater acoustics pertaining to seafloor mapping, he is experienced in the deployment of single-beam echosounders, side-scan sonars and multibeam echo-sounders and in the complex processing of these system’s data. His work is instrumental to provide the team with critical information on the seafloor including bathymetry data updates, seafloor-type and marine habitats maps, pipeline tracking, or dredging sites sedimentation monitoring.

Simon Weppe: Physical Oceanographer
Simon joined Metocean Solutions Ltd following a Master in Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Waikato, NZ. His academic research focused on measurement and numerical modelling of beach morphodynamic response to submerged structures. Specializing in wave and sediment transport modelling, he is working on a range of studies on coastal processes such as sediment dynamics at dredge sites and harbours, near shore wave dynamics, and beach protection.

Dr Séverin Thiebaut: Physical Oceanographer
Séverin is a PhD qualified scientist (University of Otago) and has recently joined MetOcean Solutions Ltd as a physical oceanographer. Séverin completed his post graduate research studies on long period ocean waves generated by atmospheric disturbances where he focused on storm surges, meteotsunamis, (far) infragravity waves and topographically trapped waves. His professional experience has been on data analysis, theoretical research on long waves and on-board data sampling. He was a research assistant for several research cruises with the University of Las Palmas de GC and Cadiz in Spain.

Dr Sarah Gardiner: Physical Oceanographer
Sarah has an MRes in Coastal Engineering and has recently submitted her PhD investigating the effects of tidal asymmetry and estuarine hydrodynamics on habitat stability, with the University of Southampton, UK. She specialises in the practical application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), including habitat mapping, data capture, processing and analysis. Through her previous work in Europe, Sarah is also experienced in coastal management, examining coastal policies and spatial planning with reference to shoreline management plans.

Wesley Warner: Web Programmer
Wes is responsible for the design and development of MetOcean Solutions, SwellMap.com and WeatherMap.co.nz websites. With a background in computer science, programming and analyst, he is adept in software programming, designed the graphical user-interfaces, (GUIs and CLI) of MetOcean’s weather forecast systems and for WXTiles (Weather forecast overlays for GoogleMaps and OpenLayers).

Karen Duncan: Commercial Manager
Karen is MetOcean’s commercial and administrative manager. She manages the organisation’s business administration, human resources, assesses commercial vendor resources and maintains operations policy, procedure and planning.