90% of everything that we buy is shipped by sea. That's 1.5 tons of cargo carried by ships for every single person alive on earth. We all rely on shipping, and that's not going to change anytime soon. 

We need to find innovative ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the shipping industry. My area of expertise is in predicting ocean currents, particular kinds of ocean currents called eddies, which are a bit like the weather systems of the ocean. 

They rotate around high and low pressure systems, just like storms do in the atmosphere. 

We can help the shipping industry find those ocean currents and find more fuel efficient route through the ocean. 

Most ships travel the shortest distance between two points on the Earth's surface.

It's known as a great circle route, but that route, although it's the shortest distance, is not the most fuel efficient route because ocean currents are constantly moving the ship off of that perfect geometrical line. 

The ship has to use its engines and therefore burn more fuel to stay on the line. 

By going with ocean currents, ships will travel slightly longer distances over the surface of the earth, but they'll travel shorter distances through the ocean because they're traveling with ocean currents rather than against them.

You can do this in real time if you know where those ocean currents are, and that's where my research comes in, being able to measure ocean currents from space and incorporate that data into high resolution state-of-the-art ocean current forecasts, using measurements from ships, sensors placed on the ships themselves, taking measurements of temperature in the open ocean. 

The research that I'm commercialising has been developed at UNSW over the past 10 years in collaboration with students, postdocs and professors throughout the university. We have the world's best ocean models for the region around Australia where we're based, and we're eager to work with shipping companies and bring that research to industry.

And we're doing that with help from Cicada Innovations, which is based here. In Sydney, we're working with them to provide the data that ship companies need to harness this research.