Dave won the Marine Zone in March 2011. Here’s how he’s been spending his prize money…

I’ve donated £300 of the prize money to TASTE for Science. TASTE is a relatively new science outreach programme that aims to bring practical science to schools in rural Uganda. Most of these schools cannot afford enough equipment for students to be able to get ‘hands on’ with science and perform their own experiments.

TASTE aim to address this by operating a mobile laboratory from the back of a van, which can travel around local schools, providing the students with some decent science equipment and demonstrators with experience using it. The first of these vans should be operational in early 2013.son

Here’s a page about my donation. You can find out more about the project at: http://tasteforscience.org/ or catch them on Twitter: @TASTEforScience.

A screen shot of the Ocean Explorer site to wet your appetite!

The remaining money has gone towards web-hosting and development of an interactive website which allows you to explore the structure of the ocean – currents, temperature and salinity through the full depth of the ocean, as well as sea ice and various instrumentation platforms.

Data comes from a variety of sources, mainly satellite and in-situ instrumentation. I have also carried out a series of high resolution model simulations of the global ocean. These
show exactly how the ocean changes with time, through a series of model animations which pop-up when you click on various areas of interest.

The website isn’t quite finished yet, when it is it will appear at http://oceanexplorer.dajs.org.uk. And a couple of screenshots of the test site are shown on the right – just to whet your appetite!