Caroline Chambers

Marine Consultant
British

Academic Qualifications
MSc Physical Oceanography, University of North Wales, Bangor (1999)
BSc Environmental Sciences (2:1), University of East Anglia (UEA) (1997)

Management Skills

•    Project Management: In the fields of policy implementation, environmental compliance assessments and engineering design within the coastal and marine sectors, including clients in both government and industry. Coordination also of a large EU international project. Strong organizational skills and have lead teams of multidisciplinary staff. Project management has included all aspects of project delivery including for example budgeting, quality, client liaison, invoicing, managing sub-consultants / partners, team coordination and programming.

•    Business Development: Particular desire and aptitude to develop business, applying strong links to many organisations in the marine environment, experience working across a number of sectors and applying techniques to new areas as required. Good success rate in winning work in new and continuing streams of work alike, e.g. Defra, the Environment Agency, SNIFFER, water companies, and the Government of Gibraltar.

•    Stakeholder engagement: Experience of managing, running and providing principal technical input to a number of workshops with central and local Government and agencies; and set up and coordination of an international conference.

Technical Skills

•    Policy: Direct project experience with the Water Framework Directive, Bathing Waters Directive, Habitats Regulations, Integrated Coastal Zone Management and the Marine and Coastal Access Bill. Mainly in developing methods for implementation and research, including socio-economic assessments and planning lead studies; and also environmental assessment to assess compliance.

•    Hydrodynamics and water quality: Assessments of currents, waves and sediment dynamics related to engineering designs (e.g. outfalls, cables). Assessment of water quality for development relating to Local Authority Water Cycle Studies, industry discharge consent compliance and control of consents by the Environment Agency. Research of water quality and design / implementation of standards to inform policy development. Modelling of near field and far field coastal environments. Also hydraulic and hydrological modelling.

•    Surveys: Estuary, lagoon, coastal and offshore experience on small boats and research vessels. Design and establishment of long term monitoring and one off surveys, training of staff, programme decision making. Equipment responsibility including water quality sondes, e.g. conductivity / temperature / depth / turbidity / DO etc (hand held, small deployed sondes and undulating ‘Scanfish’); satellite tracked drifters; water samplers; Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler; bathymetry side scan sonar. Also chemistry sample processing carried out on surveys, e.g. suspended sediment, chlorophyll.

•    GIS / remote sensing / data processing: Good skills in ArcGIS and MapInfo for data representation, analyses and demonstration (e.g. drifter track videos). Remote sensing studies with SeaWiFS, SAR and AVHRR. Programming for processing data: Fortan (good); and Matlab, Visual Basic / Excel macros, Avenue GIS programming and Mapinfo programming (reasonable).

Work Experience
 
Nov 2009 - present:- Marine Ecological Surveys Ltd
Marine Consultant

  • At MESL, Caroline is responsible for business development in marine policy and marine assessments together with the technical applications of GIS, subsea visualisation (through time) and physical processes in the marine environment.

Oct 2005 – Aug 2009:- Entec UK Ltd
Senior Marine Consultant

•    Newport Parrog long sea outfall, Morrison Construction / Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water (August 2009): Proposal manager for feasibility and detailed design study of outfall to be repaired including coordination of surveys and environmental assessment.
•    WFD Coastal Monitoring, Government of Gibraltar (August 2009): Set up and implementation of the WFD coastal monitoring of water quality and phytoplankton, including monthly monitoring, training of staff, equipment sourcing and calibration, programme management.
•    Seabed Currents and Prediction of Scour along an Offshore Cable Route, Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission Limited (SHETL) (June 2009): Assessment of the variation in seabed currents and impact on seabed sediments along the cable route, using outputs from the POLCOMS shelf model and standard sediment transport calculations.
•    Sustainability of Appraisal for National Policy Statement: Combined Gas and Storage, Department of Energy and Climate Change (June 2009): Technical input to provide marine aspects of the water quality; and flood risk and coastal erosion chapters.
•    Coastal Planning, Environment Agency, Natural England, Countryside Council for Wales, National Trust (June 2009): Marine input to understanding the integration of land and marine planning and impact on project partners with the introduction of the Marine Planning system under the Marine and Coastal Access Bill. Management of two workshops and reporting.
•    Cost of Cleaning Up Potential Gasoline, Dublin Bay, for Tank Farm Expansion, Hugh Munro & Co Ltd (April 2009):  Research of actual clean up costs in similar environments (internationally) and comparison of costs per tonne against tonne spilled, showing the likely margin of error in the site specific calculated costs.
•    Outfall Assessment PRO9, Imtech / Dym Cymru Welsh Water (December 2008): Project manager of study and compilation of marine data to inform engineering designs on priority sea outfalls for the PRO9 business plan remediation scheme development.
•    Dover Water Cycle Strategy, Dover and Folkestone District Council (October 2008): Study of impact of future proposed development with focus given to receiving waters including the River Stour, Dour; Stour Estuary and the coastal environment.
•    Rivers flow requirement assessment (August 2008): Programming with Visual Basic to extract and assess flow data to be used to study impact of flows on hydro-ecology.
•    Financial Benefit Assessment Coastal Partnerships, Defra, Local Government Association and Coastal Partnership Working Group (June 2008): Assessment of how partners benefit from working in partnership at the coast, carried out through multiple interviews and economic analyses. With follow on participation at future CPWG conferences.
•    Tees Estuary Water Quality Modelling, Progressive Energy (February 2008): Near field modeling of a discharge to the Tees using CORMIX for a proposed new power station; and use of BELPLUME model output for far-field modelling.
•    Rapid Validation of WFD Freshwater Flow Standards for Transitional Waters, EA and SNIFFER (December 2007): Collation of data and calibration to assess if ecological indicators can be used to show impact of reduction in freshwater inflows on estuary ecological status.
•    Bran Sands STW Water Quality Study Tees Estuary, Northumbrian Water Ltd (October 2007): Work to assess levels of certain heavy metals substances within the estuary and along the coast to ensure compliance with Environmental Quality Standards.
•    Delineation of Management Units within Large WFD Transitional Water Bodies, Environment Agency (June 2007): Stakeholder lead decision making process to create new boundaries within existing WFD water bodies to allow suitable areas to apply WFD tools to, including workshop with leading WFD experts from the EA and creation of new GIS layers and proposed new water bodies.
•    Marine SAC Characterisation, Natural England (May 2007): Assessment of UKSeaMap physical data for input to the GIS modelling which was used to determine habitats.
•    Coastal WFD Monitoring Programme, Government of Gibraltar (May 2007): Design of a coastal and groundwater monitoring network to comply with Article VIII within the Water Framework Directive (WFD).
•    Development of Flow Standards for Transitional Waters Bodies, SNIFFER (January 2007): Proposals through stakeholder workshops to set flow standards protect benthic invertebrates, fish, macroalgae and angiosperms and phytoplankton from impact of freshwater inflow reduction. Production of an ecological sensitivities typology for each transitional water type and subsequent flow standards.
•    WFD Hydrological Regime High Status Classification of Transitional Waters, Environment Agency (January 2006): Development of a classification method to determine those transitional waters in England and Wales at candidate high status with regards to the hydrological regime, carried out through stakeholder workshops and development of decision making tool.
•    Habitats Directive Review of Consents, Estuaries in Anglian Region, Environment Agency (December 2005): A Hydrological Impact Assessment for Stage 3 of the Review of Consents on the Wash Estuary including consideration of the Level Dependent Environment (Washes) and ecology, particularly sensitivity of birds to changes in freshwater flows to the estuaries. Also support on other Anglian Framework studies, e.g Breydon Water, North Norfolk Coast.

Sep 2003 – Mar 2006:- University College London (UCL)
Research Fellow

•    Monitoring and modelling coastal lagoons: making management tools for aquatic resources in North Africa, European Union (February 2006): Project research officer for a large EU funded project. Included coordination of partners and their training in field work for surveys of bathymetry hydrology, water quality, vegetation, sediments and biology. Also development of MIKE 2D and 3D lagoon models with DHI, with responsibility for the Ghar el Melh (Tunisia) model, incorporating hydrodynamic and water quality modelling. Coordination of an international conference and creation of websites.

Sep 2001 – Sep 2003:- Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS)
Oceanographer

•    Contaminant Pathways in UK Shelf Seas, DEFRA: A project which examined contaminant, nutrient and sediment dynamics in the UK shelf seas based on the controlling physical processes, principally density driven, or baroclinic jets. Use of towed instrumentation (Scanfish); drogued drifters; ADCP, CTD rosettes; and onboard laboratory analyses. Using these data research was carried out to compare the tracks made by the drogued drifters at sea with calculated density driven flows as well as with flows predicted form shelf sea models (POM). This included writing a GIS program to produce a ‘video’ of drifters moving in the ocean, as monitored using satellite detection.

Apr 2001 Cawthron Institute
Survey assistant

•    Mussel Farm Ecological Impact Assessment, Confidential client: A two week survey in coastal waters to monitor physical and ecological parameters at a potential mussel farm site, supported by GIS sampling techniques.

Sep 1999 – Sep 2000:- Environment Agency
Oceanographer and GIS officer

•    Correlation of SeaWiFS satellite measured and in-situ chlorophyll  for testing of existing and developing Environment Agency SeaWiFS chlorophyll algorithms, Internal Research (September 2000): GIS and remote sensing was used to test SeaWiFS algorithms to measure chlorophyll, based on correlation with in-situ measurements. Existing algorithms developed by NASA were compared to a new algorithm developed at the EA which accounts for high suspended sediment, in particular for coastal waters.

Nov 1997 – Sep 1998:- Kennedy & Donkin Ltd (now Parsons Brinckerhoff)
Assistant Consultant

•    Flood Risk Mapping, Northumbria Region, Environment Agency: Hydraulic modelling using HEC-RAS for prediction of river flood levels as part of the Environment Agency driven Flood Plain Mapping project.
•    River Asset Survey, Devon region, Environment Agency: Surveys carried out of river assets including bridge and bank condition, for input to GIS / database.
•    Website: Creation of website to be used by group within company

Aug 1997 – Nov 1997:- Environment Agency
GIS officer

•    Production of summary environmental data at national scale and creation of maps and internet page editing.

Research During Studies

•    Research of mesoscale ocean features using remote sensing (SAR / AVHRR) (October 1999): Masters thesis examining the success of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to detect mesoscale (ocean features in the Faro-Shetland channel. Image geo-referencing and calibration, comparison of results against sea surface temperature (collected from AVHRR imagery) and in-situ measurements with cooperation from Fugro GEOS consultants.

•    Temporal analysis of sea-ice coverage in Antarctica and detection of polynyas (May 1997): Research was undertaken to extract area coverage of ice in the Antarctic during a 10 year period. Images were assessed using Matlab coding to form a time series of area covered.

Examples of Work
Design and technical content completed:

Work Locations
•    Countries worked in / for: England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, Denmark, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, New Zealand
•    Marine areas surveyed: Irish Sea, English Channel, North Sea, lagoons in North Africa, Bay of Plenty (New Zealand)