Understanding the North Sea system

The NERC North Sea Project finished in April 1991. In a radical new approach to shelf sea studies, the philosophy of the project and the implementation plan were developed by the community itself, in a series of workshops and study groups starting from an NERC review of shelf sea science in May 1985. To emphasize the strategic relevance of the study, the development of environmental water quality models which will have prognostic capability for determining the fate of pollutants was taken as a goal. A number of objectives were set for the five year period: (i) to construct and validate a transport model which adequately describes all aspects of the physics and can predict the dispersion of a conservative contaminant; (ii) to identify and quantify the important non-conservative processes which involve the interaction of pollutants with the biota and sediments; (iii) to obtain a definitive, coherent database for all key variables over the seasonal cycle. The new results and the related modelling studies were considered publicly for the first time at a Discussion Meeting held at the Royal Society on 4 and 5 November 1992. This volume records the presentations and discussions contributed on that occasion. -after Editors