History

Teaching and research in the field of coastal and harbor engineering have been started in 1964 at the Civil Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University (METU). Within the undergraduate program of the Civil Engineering Department, “Coastal and Ocean Engineering Division” offers fundamental courses in this special field. For the graduate programs, courses offered are aimed at specialization leading to the degrees “Master of Science and “Doctor of Philosophy” in “Coastal and Ocean Engineering”. Steady progress in the coastal and ocean engineering have led to be the establishment of Coastal and Harbor Engineering Research Institute (KLARE) in 1977. The institute had changed the name to Ocean Engineering Research Center in 1994.

Major research interests:

• generation and transformation of wind waves,
• tidal waves and currents,
• wave hindcasting and statistics,
• wave-structure interactions,
• design of coastal and harbor structures,
• port and marina planning,
• coastal pollution,
• coastal sedimentation,
• offshore engineering,
• marine renewable energy,
• integrated coastal zone management,
• sea level rise,
• climate change,
• marine hazards.

Over the years, Ocean Engineering Research Center gathered wide and uncompetitive knowledge about Turkey’s coastal hydraulics and its modeling by the wave flumes and basins and in-house developed (such as for wind wave hindcasting, tsunami propagation and inundation, shoreline and beach evolution, coastal vulnerability assessment, wave-structure interaction), open-source and commercial coastal and ocean engineering numerical modeling tools.

Applied Research Projects

METU Ocean Engineering Research Center takes its roots from basic and applied research which contributes to science. Number and quality of theses and researches are the best evidence for this scientific responsibility. Over the years more than 190 M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis were given by Coastal and Ocean Engineering Department. More than 100 national basic and applied projects, sponsored by Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, Ministry of Transportation, Maritime Affairs and Communication, TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey), Ministry of Development, Environmental Protection Agency for Special Areas (EPASA) and Private Sector, were carried out. There are also numerous completed and on-going international projects, scientific activities in collaboration with: European Council, British Council, Defra, NATO, UTM Malaysia and DID Malaysia, UNESCO (IOC), FEMA, University of Southern California (USA), Tohoku University Disaster Control Research Center (Japan), and Russian Academy of Science.