About the Project
Scientific significance
The most severe impacts of climate change will arise through changes in the occurrence of extreme weather events, and yet attempts to increase society’s resilience to such extremes is hampered by inadequate understanding of how these extremes will be modified under a changing climate.
This is a pressing and societally-important scientific issue.
This project will bring together two prominent climate change projection techniques (perturbed weather generators and pattern scaling) to obtain a next-generation scientific tool that combines advantages from both. You will benefit from working across the boundary between scientific research and industry, including an extended research visit at CASE-partner Atkins (http://www.atkinsglobal.com/en-GB), to develop improved projections of extreme weather under climate change.
Research plan
1) Use existing datasets of observations and climate model projections to identify changing weather extremes across the land masses of the world, and to evaluate how their characteristics change as a function of global warming.
2) Apply these findings to implement a weather generator (a statistical tool that generates sequences of realistic weather) across different climate regimes, and where the pattern of weather generator parameters can be scaled (pattern scaling) to represent future climate regimes.
3) There are many scientific challenges to address when applying this across the globe (e.g. representing extreme rainfall from hurricanes that only rarely affect a particular location), by considering the meteorological setting and how they can be represented better in a statistical sense.
4) These scientific developments will lead to the development of a new tool, suitable for and co-designed by expert practitioners working in industry who use knowledge about the changing risks from extreme weather events.
Training
You will gain transferable skills necessary to pursue a range of academic and non-academic careers: scientific computing tools and programming (e.g. ‘R’) including the ability to use and interpret computer model outputs, industry experience and communication at technical and scientific levels.
Person specification
An Honours degree (2:1 or higher) in a relevant subject area (Environmental Sciences, Physics, Maths, Statistics, Geography or a related discipline), an aptitude for research, numerate and a clear communicator.
Funding Notes
This project has been shortlisted for funding by the EnvEast NERC Doctoral Training Partnership, comprising the Universities of East Anglia, Essex and Kent, with twenty other research partners.
Shortlisted applicants will be interviewed on 14/15 February 2017.
Successful candidates who meet RCUK’s eligibility criteria will be awarded a NERC studentship. In most cases, UK and EU nationals who have been resident in the UK for 3 years are eligible for a full award. In 2016/17, the stipend was £14,296.
For further information, please visit www.enveast.ac.uk/apply
References
(i) Osborn TJ, Wallace CJ, Harris IC and Melvin TM (2016) Pattern scaling using ClimGen: monthly-resolution future climate scenarios including changes in the variability of precipitation. Climatic Change, 134, 353-369 (doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1509-9).
(ii) Arnell NW, Lowe JA, Brown S, Gosling SN, Gottschalk P, Hinkel J, Lloyd-Hughes B, Nicholls RJ, Osborn TJ, Osborne TM, Rose GA, Smith P and Warren R (2013) A global assessment of the effects of climate policy on the impacts of climate change. Nature Climate Change 3, 512-519 (doi:10.1038/NCLIMATE1793).
(iii) Jones PD, Harpham C, Burton A and Goodess CM (2016) Downscaling regional climate model outputs for the Caribbean using a weather generator. International Journal of Climatology (doi:10.1002/joc.4624).
(iv) Darch GJC, McSweeney RT, Kilsby CG, Jones PD, Osborn TJ and Tomlinson JE (2016) Analysing changes in short duration extreme rainfall events. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Water Management (doi:10.1680/jwama.14.00040).
(v) Maraun D, Wetterhall F, Ireson AM, Chandler RE, Kendon EJ, Widmann M, Brienen S, Rust HW, Sauter J, Themel M, Venema VKC, Chun KP, Goodess CM, Jones RG, Onof C, Vrac M and Thiele-Eich I (2010) Precipitation downscaling under climate change: Recent developments to bridge the gap between dynamical models and the end user. Reviews of Geophysics 48, RG3003 (doi:10.1029/2009RG000314).
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