PhD Research Project

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Downscaling of climate model outputs to sub-daily time-scales

Institution:

Imperial College London

Dept/School/Faculty:

Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

PhD Supervisor:

Dr C Onof

Application Deadline:

No more applications being accepted

Funding Availability:

Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)

PhD Research Project

Hydrological simulation and design needs to take into account the projected changes as estimated by General and Regional Circulation Models (GCM/RCM). Much experience has been gained about how to use the reliable information produced by such models (pressure, mean sea-level pressure, ...) to generate in particular realistic time-series of rainfall at a number of sites over an area of interest (e.g. catchment). The Generalised Linear Model approach that is used for that purpose is not, however, adapted to the generation of finer-scale rainfall because of the complexity of the spatial structure of rainfall at those finer scales. For many hydrological applications, the daily time-scale is too coarse, so that another disaggregation tool is required to produce hourly and potentially sub-hourly rainfall series. This project will focus upon using point process models of rainfall at a single site to carry out this task. The idea will be to carry out the temporal downscaling at one site and use that information to downscale rainfall at the other sites so as to reproduce the observed hourly or sub-hourly spatial structure. One avenue of investigation will be whether information about storm advection can be inferred from an RCM. The project is closely linked to work currently carried out for Anglian Water and Black & Veatch, and interaction with the Grantham Institute on climatological issues is expected.

Computational skills and some basic statistical knowledge are required.

Funding Notes:

NERC or EPSRC funding is available to provide PhD scholarships for suitably qualified eligible UK residents and EU citizens. Rules for funding eligibility can be found on the NERC (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/funding/ ) and EPSRC (http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/Pages/default.aspx ) websites.

If you are interested in this studentship please send a covering email and CV to the relevant supervisor.

PLEASE NOTE: ALL APPLICATIONS RECEIVED ON OR BEFORE 16 APRIL WILL BE CONSIDERED, THEREAFTER APPLICATIONS WILL REMAIN OPEN UNTIL A SUITABLE CANDIDATE IS FOUND.