About the Project
The goal of the project is to use palaeoenvironmental data to produce more realistic projections of regional climate changes, focusing on northern hemisphere monsoon regions. It will complement work being conducted in the NERC REAL project, a multi-institutional initiative to improve future climate projections by using modern-day constraints and advanced statistical techniques.
The simulation of past climate states provides a rigorous test of the ability of climate models that are being used to predict climate changes during the 21st century. Palaeoenvironmental evidence has consistently shown that Earth-system models underestimate the increase in rainfall in northern hemisphere monsoon regions in response to changes in orbital and greenhouse gas forcing during the Holocene by a considerable amount (Braconnot et al., 2012; Perez Sanz et al., 2014). Relating the magnitude of this mismatch to the spatial pattern and magnitude of the change in radiative forcing, will allow discrepancies between observed and simulated precipitation changes to be used as an additional source of information that can be used to modify future projections.
Past precipitation changes will be reconstructed, using a diagnostic water-balance approach (e.g. Joussaume et al., 1999) from multiple sources of information, including data from lake and vegetation changes, charcoal records of wildfire, dust emissions and speleothem isotopes. These estimates will be combined with existing quantitative climate reconstructions (Bartlein et al., 2011) to make a robust estimate of precipitation changes through the late Holocene (6000 yr BP to present) in each of the northern hemisphere monsoon regions. These precipitation estimates will be compared to model simulations of the transient response to changes in orbital and greenhouse-gas forcing during the late Holocene, as well as snapshot simulations incorporating additional potential forcings (vegetation and land-surface changes, dust, emissions from wildfires), being run by the Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project. The comparisons will be used to construct an error matrix with respect to the patterns and magnitude of radiative-forcing changes, which will then be applied as an implied additional precipitation change to future projections (RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 8.5) from multiple climate models. This approach will be tested in an idealized framework using multiple sets of model simulations as inputs, treating each model in turn as ‘pseudo-observations’ to examine the potential for this technique.
In parallel with developments in the REAL project, the project will provide a more robust basis for projecting future monsoon changes in regions that support more than one third of the world’s population...
TRAINING
The student will have the option to attend various MSc courses in the Department of Meteorology, covering climate change and tropical meteorology, for example. Environmental policy and sustainability courses in the Centre for Environment and Sustainability (University of Surrey) will be made available to the student to allow them to develop the policy skills and help them improve their understanding of wider societal sustainability issues.
The project is designed as a thesis-by-papers, and this will allow the student to develop science communication skills as well as training in publication and project management. The student will participate in planned meetings of the REAL project, thus having the opportunity to benefit from exposure to a large research network and an early appreciation of policy-relevant science. They will also have the opportunity to attend the biennial meetings (2019, 2021) of the Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project, thus gaining insights into the state-of-the-art in palaeoclimate research and opportunities to present their research to a critical audience.
The student will have the opportunity to attend the NCAS Climate Modelling Summer School in Cambridge or other European city, in order to gain further insight into the benefits and drawbacks of the current generation of GCMs.
The CASE placement will be with WWF-UK based at their Woking office. This placement will allow the student to see how research can be used to inform conservation decisions and influence policymakers (with a focus on climate and energy, and fresh water). They will have access to WWF’s extensive international network including those working in geographies relevant to monsoon research.
To read more about this project please click this link: http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/nercdtp/home/available/desc/entry2018/SC201814.pdf
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