Software for Society: Tackling Climate Change with Code

Heather Norton, Software Developer, is presenting on ForeCoast® Marine at the CodeMill Digital Skills event on Thursday 8 March.

Most people are aware that the earth is warming, and that our society needs to make significant changes in order to stop it. This can seem like an impossible task outside of the scale of anyone’s everyday life. Heather’s presentation will demonstrate how our powerful metocean forecasting and planning software, ForeCoast® Marine, is tackling a piece of this problem.

ForeCoast® Marine

The most comprehensive metocean risk management tool available, ForeCoast® Marine enables weather downtime strategies to be optimised at every phase of a project, thereby reducing costs, improving efficiency and minimising Health and Safety risks.

Heather will briefly introduce the field of marine energy to the CodeMill Digital Skills event attendees, and explain how offshore wind farm developers are using this software to try out new strategies in a virtual world, which are resulting in better decisions and cheaper clean energy.

With her recent experiences in scaling up the software to look at the impacts of climate change all over Europe, Heather will share and explain how massive computer programs are acting as ‘crystal balls’ to locate vulnerable people, ecosystems, and industries so that we can mitigate against the impacts of climate change long into the future.

Heather Norton, Software developer

Over the past eight years Heather has written code for controlling lasers in atomic science experiments, has helped entrepreneurs in rural Ghana with their financial planning, reduced energy use in office buildings, and a variety of projects in between. Originally from Canada, she studied Engineering Physics at Queen’s University and Engineering for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge, before settling with us in Skipton where she works on ForeCoast® Marine.