About the Project
Monsoon systems are vital to society, their influence affecting 2.5 billion people in the tropics, and rains during summer providing the majority of water for agriculture, industry and food. In India, 80% of rainfall occurs from June to September, so variations in monsoon timing, duration or intensity have clear impacts on agriculture, livelihoods and economic development.
Unfortunately, representations of the monsoon in GCMs are poor. Convection is usually parametrized, leading to poor representations of cloud processes and the diurnal cycle. The transitions between shallow and deep convection are also very difficult processes to model, even in convection-permitting models. Cloud development feeds back onto the large-scale circulation, leading to an intimate “coupling” between convective rainfall and circulation in the tropics.
Recently, progress has been made in understanding cloud and circulation feedbacks involved as the monsoon progresses across India during its onset; shallow cumulus-congestus clouds are thought to moisten the free troposphere ahead of the monsoon, priming the atmosphere for the deep convection to follow. However, accurate observations of monsoon clouds and their development are extremely limited. Fortunately, following the INCOMPASS field campaign of 2016, we have data from a network of Doppler weather radar (DWR) spread across India, for the monsoon onset period of 15 May to 15 July.
This project will use the Indian DWR data, in conjunction with spaceborne measurements, to study the occurrence of clouds, their vertical distribution and their development as the monsoon onset passes across India. The project will further examine the influence of modelled cloud processes on the circulation using experiments at convection-permitting resolutions in the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM).
The project seeks to answer the following fundamental questions:
• What are the populations of different cloud depths at various locations during advance of the monsoon across India over various types of land surface?
• What are the convective processes related to monsoon cloud structures and their development and how do they relate to synoptic conditions such as the passage of a monsoon depression?
• How well are monsoon cloud processes simulated in convective-permitting models?
• What are the impacts of cloud microphysical processes on circulation and propagation of synoptic systems such as monsoon depressions?
Initially, the student will identify the occurrence of cloud types (shallow/congestus clouds; deep convection; over-shooting convection) across India and determine how these vary during the advance of the monsoon, and during anomalously wet and dry spells. The ground-based DWR analysis for 2016 will be compared to longer-term satellite-based climatologies.
This work will be followed by analysis to link cloud development to convective processes and the monsoon circulation. Cloud development will be tracked in the DWR data and compared against the radiosonde data from the INCOMPASS database.
Finally, in collaboration with partners at India’s National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), who are involved in the MetUM Partnership, the student will use convection-permitting simulations to evaluate the evolution of cloud structures over India during the monsoon, and to determine the impacts of cloud on latent heating, the surface energy budget and on circulation.
To read more about this project please follow the link: http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/nercdtp/home/available/desc/entry2018/SC201811.pdf
Funding Notes
The project is part of the SCENARIO Doctoral Training Partnership and is potentially fully-funded, subject to selection based on candidate excellence. Funding is available for UK or EU students. Funding is not available for international students.
To apply, please refer to the SCENARIO website at http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/nercdtp/home/available/
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