The overall goal of the Physical Oceanography Research Laboratory (PORL) is to be a centre of ocean, coastal and inland water science and engineering. The centre develops and sustains a broad and deep expertise in hydrodynamic and environmental processes in South East Asia with a focus on Singapore Strait, South-China Sea, and Malacca Strait.

The primary objective of PORL is to study hydrodynamic, water quality and ecological processes in tropical seas. These processes, influenced by variables such as wind, waves, currents, temperature, land runoff and river discharges, are the dominant mechanisms for transport and dispersion of matter into and out of the marine ecosystem. Interactions with biological and chemical components of the system are also of importance and these are studied in combination with physical processes for a more comprehensive understanding of tropical marine ecosystems.

Physical oceanography research conducted by the Field Monitoring and Instrumentation group includes the application and development of specialized instrumentation, deployment and retrieval of these instruments at sea and processing of the collected data. With advancing technology, observational physical oceanography has been rapidly progressing; these developments have enabled significantly more efficient ocean observations. Goals of measurements are (1) to enhance description of ocean three dimensional circulation and mixing across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, (2) to better describe the distributions of ocean properties (temperature, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, etc.) at the same scales  to help deduce the mean circulation.

Computational Environmental Fluid Dynamics is a powerful tool to explore natural phenomena. The Laboratory is constantly working on research, development and applications in the fields of ocean and coastal modelling. This includes modelling of surface waves; simulation of currents, driven by wind, wave and tidal forcing; a suite of water quality models for acute and chronic chemical spills; sediment transport model. All the models are three-dimensional, state-of-the-art in their respective fields. All the models are rigorously tested and validated for South China Sea, Singapore and Malacca Straits. They are used routinely for forecasting purposes.

Data driven techniques have now been a permanent "fixture" in almost all research activities undertaken to complement its counterpart, the physically based models. For examples, TIME VARIANT TIDAL ELEVATIONS required by ocean models, for its initial and boundary conditions, have been generated by artificial neural networks; SEA TEMPERATURE PROFILES have been successfully projected, based on the sea surface temperature only, with the assistance of genetic programming; various SEA WATER QUALITY PARAMETERS have also been forecast with reasonably good agreement with their measured data or data simulated by numerical models. As expected, to have an effective operational system data driven techniques are tools to be considered.