Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi is an Oceanographer at the University of Western Australia.

For over 25 years, Chari has been instrumental in showcasing the power behind the waters that surround us, including discoveries in tsunami impacts and dense shelf water transport.

Essentially oceanography studies the ocean, but there’s so much more to it, which Chari explains later.

Chari received the People's Choice Award at the Premier’s Scientist of the Year for 2025 for his contributions to Australian oceanography.

His work also helped discover locations of debris from the missing MH370 flight back in 2014, which we talk about as well.

Using oceanic drift modelling with Pawsey’s supercomputer, Chari was able to simulate two years’ worth of moving water. This gave plane debris locations along Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania.

Chari sees what he does as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, taking each piece – like supercomputing, fieldwork and satellite imagery – and putting it together to see the whole picture. Chari has documented a lot of what makes our waters different from the rest of the world.

He was one of the first users of iVEC, which was what Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre was called until 2014.

His love for the ocean has taken him from his home in Sri Lanka to the United Kingdom, and now in Australia, studying the Indian Ocean and why it vastly differs from other oceans.

Chapters:

• 01:34 - Discovering Oceanography
• 02:23 - Early Life in Sri Lanka
• 09:35 - From Sri Lanka to the UK
• 14:59 - Starting a Career in Computing and HPC
• 17:32 - Arriving in Australia and the Birth of MATLAB
• 20:58 - Supercomputers Transforming Ocean Science
• 27:55 - Global Data Collection and Observing Systems
• 36:04 - Major Scientific Breakthroughs
• 41:55 - The MH370 Search
• 46:52 - Future of Ocean Science & Climate Modelling

Watch our interview with Charitha Pattiaratchi from 2019: Finding MH370 using oceanographic modelling

Watch the video of this episode.

Click here to view the episode transcript.

Welcome to HPC Hearts & Minds, where we talk to some of the people using High Performance Computing (or HPC) to solve some of today’s most fascinating discoveries.

This series is all about finding out the real-world impact that comes from using this large-scale computing.

We talk to researchers and scientists across Australia on how they have used HPC to discover their breakthroughs.

With hundreds of projects going on at any one time, we've yet to tap into all of these incredible stories. Those hearts and minds we keep mentioning here at Pawsey.

We've been lucky enough to talk to some incredibly passionate, sharp, generous people about the work they have done, and continue to do.

We hope you get as much joy listening to these as we did when we got to talk to each one. There's a lot of stories to dig out, and we can't wait to share them with you.

Visit our website to learn more about Pawsey.